Stride Ahead: An Aid to Comprehension

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Stride Ahead has been written for students who can read but have difficulty in understanding what they are reading. I believe that this is the result of their minds being too taken up with the mechanics of decoding the written language to be able to give adequate attention to meaning. Typically, they would begin with a ‘benchmark time’ of 20 seconds and make several mistakes and / or get tongue-tied. We refute this charge. Our counter is how do most words enter a person’s vocabulary? Surely, ‘Barking at Print’ is how we all start to read in the first place? Automaticity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required. This enables a student’s thought processes to become an automatic response pattern or habit. A. Students with reading difficulties will establish a word in their short term memory. However, they are likely to forget it just as easily unless we fix the word in their long term memory.

It doesn’t matter if you are aged 7 or 70, Toe By Toe can improve any struggling reader’s reading age by years, in just a few weeks or months of studying. This can typically be achieved with just 20 minutes a day. A. Both manuals can be used in the same lesson. However, we recommend alternating between a reading lesson one day and a spelling lesson on the next. Alternatively, some people prefer to finish or partially complete Toe by Toe before starting Stareway. As a rough guideline, if a student studied Stride Ahead 30-minute every day, the average time to complete Stride Ahead would be 2-3 months.To a large extent the timing targets in Stride Ahead are arbitrary. In essence, we have timed a ‘normal’ person reading the passage at ‘normal’ speed and then added a few seconds to come up with our target. Therefore, it does not really matter whether students are achieving the precise target. Stride Ahead is the perfect tool to help these particular students. Studying Stride Ahead helps students to increasingly blank out the white noise of written text (that is, the minor details of a text). It is the worrying over the ‘minor detail’ of a text that distracts a student from achieving the main object of reading a text: understanding it and extracting meaning from it. Author Keda Cowling believes that this inability to extract meaning from a text results from their minds being too ‘busy.’ That is, they think too much about the mechanics of decoding the written language. This results in them being unable to give adequate time and attention to the meaning in a text. A further consequence is that they become stressed in time-limited situations (like tests, exams or work-related situations) and so fail to perform to the best of their ability. Stride Ahead is the natural ‘next step’ from Toe By Toe. Toe By Toe teaches ‘decoding’ skills. This enables students to read more fluently with good pronunciation. However, many still need help in making sense of the written word. This is where Stride Ahead helps. At the time Keda began her research into children’s reading problems, few people had even heard of the term ‘dyslexia’. Keda became fascinated by the condition and her private research soon became an all-consuming obsession.

This is the ‘holy grail’ of reading. We are unlikely to get to this point with a severely dyslexic student but we can aim to get as close as possible. Timed practice is the best way to achieve automaticity. Effectively, Stride Ahead is a structured series of timing targets. Stride Ahead is the natural ‘next step’ from Toe By Toe. Toe By Toe teaches ‘decoding’ skills. This enables students to read more fluently with good pronunciation. However, many still need help in making sense of the written word. This is what Stride Ahead helps to improve. In 2006, Anne began Hands On Horses, a program that allowed children with disabilities, at-risk youth, and elderly clients to connect with these evolutionary partners of ours. Certainly, by the time they have reached Part Four they should be reading something which matches their interests away from the scheme itself.

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A. No. Toe By Toe requires that each student has a reading coach for every exercise; it teaches students to read and tutors to teach. Every target should be met, BUT (and this is very important to remember) it is not necessary to reach every target time in sequence.