The Bravo! Booster Pack
Decoding is the Foundation of Reading
If your child stammers while reading out loud, guesses at words, or struggles to understand what was read, then decoding skills need to be mastered. Decoding is the ability to sound out words. To start decoding, your child must have automatic knowledge of all letter sounds, including vowels. Also, your child must be able to blend letter sounds together to form words.
This is usually easy enough! But if your child has dyslexia, it seems impossible. That’s because most kids with dyslexia are taught with traditional programs that don’t speak their “learning language”. Kids with dyslexia, especially need a reading system that teaches them to decode words because they have poor reading strategies, are weak in visual and auditory processing skills, and need to move to learn.
Because Kids with Dyslexia Learn Differently, they Need Different Activities
Children with dyslexia learn differently than their peers. That doesn’t mean these kids aren’t smart! One of the symptoms of dyslexia is average or above average intelligence. It simply means these kids need different types of instruction to help them understand information.
Most kids with dyslexia are hands-on or tactile learners. This means they learn by doing, not seeing or hearing. Kids with dyslexia desperately need to move to learn, yet most traditional reading and decoding programs use hearing and seeing as the main teaching modes.
This won’t work for the child with dyslexia! The dots simply won’t connect.
Teaching Decoding Skills in a Way They Understand
Kids with dyslexia make excellent reading progress…with the right teaching methods. Research tells us that kids with dyslexia do best with an Orton-Gillingham based decoding program. They also need multi-sensory methods of learning as well a strong sense of phonemic awareness.
Yet most traditional reading programs fail to give the dyslexic child these reading and learning tools. Did you know that one in five has dyslexia? That’s a lot of kids struggling to read in any given classroom. If they simply had a reading program they could understand, then it wouldn’t have to be this way.
If your child has dyslexia, most likely you’ve heard a lot of words misread. You’ve probably encouraged your child to read more, to work harder. You might have bought some flashcards that promised to help or purchased some phonics sheets.
It’s Like Speaking a Foreign Language
But this is like speaking the wrong language to your child. Kids with dyslexia just don’t learn this way. Having them circle pictures and matching sounds doesn’t work. Flashcards leave them lacking. Comprehension questions seem impossible because they’re missing crucial decoding skills and end up guessing at words instead of sounding them out.
But give these kids movement, and you’ll find a smile on their faces while they connect the dots. Talk to them in their “learning language”, and skills soar. Stammering stops. Fluency rises. Comprehension is easy.
Give them a predictable way of sounding out words that’s based on phonemic awareness, and they will soar.
The Three Pillars of Poor Reading
But give them the wrong mode of learning, and desperation sets in. Your child will guess at words, and this directly affects reading comprehension and fluency.
Kids with dyslexia are terrible about taking wild guesses at words instead of sounding them out. They usually start strong, sounding out the first two or three letters. But then panic sets in. Or they become fatigued. The next letters seem daunting. A crazy guess is made.
The problem with guessing at words is that the guess is usually incorrect. This changes the meaning of the text, so comprehension questions are missed. Tests aren’t passed. Grades plummet.
Fluency is affected negatively as well. Since your child is reading letters and words incorrectly (guessing), there is a bit of pause for self-correction. This is enough to slow down the reader. Or, teachers stop your child to make a correction. Once again, the flow of learning is affected, and your child must reorient back onto the page and start anew.
Memorizing Words Isn’t a Great Strategy for Decoding
Kids with dyslexia also memorize words in another desperate attempt to read new or unfamiliar words. This is a bit better than guessing at words, because at least there’s a bit of strategy involved. But this isn’t a dependable method either, as we have over one million words in our language. That’s way too many words to memorize.
Another route kids with dyslexia take is trial and error reading. This is where your child randomly encounters successes when reading. The problem arises because your child can’t be sure exactly how decoding success was met. It’s hard to repeat something when you don’t recognize how it was achieved!
All three of these methods of reading are simply bad habits and they are called the Three Pillars of Poor Reading. With a strong decoding program tailored to your child’s learning style, these bad habits go by the wayside, often in as little as three weeks!
Phonemic Awareness – the Route to Decoding Success
Decoding is the backbone of reading. But it’s heavily dependent on your child’s ability to use phonemes with efficiency.
Phonemes are the small units of sound that make up our language. There are forty-four phonemes in our language. Longer words are simply these smaller units of sound that are built upon with other letter sound combinations. If your child has a strong grasp of phonemic awareness, then multi-syllable words can be read with ease and confidence.
Examples of phonemes are, “am”, “it”, “ux”, “op”, and “ub”.
If your child struggles to sound out words, the first step toward decoding success is to make sure all forty-four phonemes are learned with automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform a task without conscious thought. Riding a bike or driving a car are examples of other activities that rely on automaticity to be performed well.
Building a Phonemic Sound Unit Foundation Helps Your Child Decode Words
Once your child has a firm grasp of phonemes, it’s time to start building onto the phonemic sound unit foundation! Traditional programs for kids with dyslexia barely touch on this step and rarely teach it to mastery. Even worse, words aren’t laid out in strategic order or decoded using movement. Print is also small, which only frustrates a child with dyslexia.
Your child needs to learn an array of phonemic units in a logical, predictable way. Kids with dyslexia need predictability because their worlds are often chaotic. They take in visual and auditory stimuli that’s often skewed or distorted. These kids learn differently than their peers, so the entire school system is set up for the other children’s success, not for theirs. This is a quick route to reading failure.
Movement Helps Kids with Dyslexia Learn to Decode
Kids with dyslexia also need to learn phonemes with movement. Movement is their jam – their main “learning language”. That’s because they are usually weak in visual and auditory processing skills. Since most children with dyslexia are tactile learners, it’s best to teach them through movement – and lots of it.
In addition, these phonemic unit “bases” that are built upon need split into chunks as your child reads them. This chunking is how kids with dyslexia learn. These kids get overwhelmed with an entire, multi-syllable word. But give them three small chunks, and soon they’re reading multi-syllable words like champs!
The Nuts and Bolts of the Booster Pack
The Bravo! Booster is a supplemental decoding system that shows your child how to master phonemic units! By using movement, color, pictures, “chunking”, an Orton-Gillingham approach to decoding, and a multi-sensory route to learning, kids with dyslexia learn to decode in their “language”, not someone else’s.
Step-by-step, your child learns to use and decode the forty-four basic phonemic units that our language is built on. But the Booster Pack takes it several steps further. A true decoding foundation is built as your child “chunks” more and more sound unit pieces onto the original sound units.
Soon, multisensory words are read with ease. Bad reading habits go by the wayside. Fluency scores increase because your child knows how to sound out new and unfamiliar words instead of guessing at them.
In Level 1 of the Bravo! Booster, your child masters basic phonemes like “an” and “ip”. These are fairly easy for most kids with dyslexia to figure out, which is great because they are the most important ones of all!
Chunking Units of Sound Helps the Decoding Process
Your child uses a fat-tipped marker to slide across the “broken” phonemic units to master “chunking” skills while saying the sound out loud at the same time. This is multisensory learning at its finest and helps with the blending process as well.
Print is extra large so your child can focus on chunking, phonemic awareness, and decoding instead of stressing over small letters!
In Level 2 of the Bravo! Booster Pack, your child advances to phonemic units like “and” and “ent”. This is where the decoding and chunking take place that set the stage for sounding out multi-syllable words.
As before, your child uses movement to break the unit into two chunks while saying it out loud at the same time. At the far left, your child says the word out loud while sliding the marker across the Bravo! Bolt at the same time.
By the time your child reaches Level 3 of the Bravo! Booster Pack, basic phonemes are read with automaticity. Now your child is ready to work on long vowel sounds with the tricky silent “e”. This is a type of phonemic unit rarely seen in this way, with movement and chunking still involved in helping your child master this difficult skill.
Once long vowels are mastered, your child has a firm grasp on one-syllable and some two-syllable words. Now it’s time to introduce variants. Variants are words in our language that don’t follow traditional reading and spelling patterns. Variants are typically difficult for kids with dyslexia. These kids crave predictability and consistency, so these “exceptions to the rules” send them reeling.
Level 4 of the Bravo! Booster Pack introduces variants to your child. It’s easy to learn variants with chunking and movement!
The final level of the Bravo! Booster Pack really helps your child with not only variants but multi-syllable words. As your child slides the marker across phonemic units, saying the sound out loud at the same time, the variants set in. This is the way dyslexic kids learn and by now they are confident decoders!
The Most Thorough Decoding System Available
Designed for Dyslexia…Works for Anyone
The Bravo! Booster Pack is the first in a lineup of Bravo! Reading’s expansion packs that help children with dyslexia master decoding and reading skills. All letter sounds need to be known, including all vowels both long and short in order to use this multi-sensory phonemic awareness program. In addition, your child needs to be able blend letter sounds together to form words.
The Bravo! Booster Pack is meant for older kids – those in third grade above.
Your child must know all letter sounds – including long and short vowel sounds – in order to use the Bravo! Booster Pack. If your reader doesn’t know letter sounds with automaticity (automatically), we recommend using the Bravo! Beginner, where brain-based learner makes it a snap.
Save money with the Complete Bravo! Reading System. Get the Bravo! Booster Pack within a package deal and make your child’s reading problems disappear!
With the Complete Bravo! Reading System, you’ll get the Bravo! Booster Pack, the Bravo! Beginner, and all of the Bravo! Expansion Packs. You’ll also get all eleven levels of the Bravo! Reading System!
The Bravo! Reading System Will Turn Your Child Into a Reading Shark
The Bravo! Beginner and the Bravo! Expansion Packs – More Movement and Decoding to Make Reading Easier for Your Child
Value: $1969.83
Package Cost: $399.99
When you order the Bravo! Booster Pack, you’ll receive it immediately as a digital file. We highly recommend printing it off and having your reader use a marker to master phonemic awareness skills, but it has the capability of being used in a tablet or on a laptop.
This decoding program is designed for grades 3 and above.
