How The Brain Learns |
How RWT!™ Teaches |
| The young brain handles concrete concepts better than abstracts. |
RWT!™ presents abstract concepts very concretely. For example, the keyboard is set up as two houses. The abstract letters are made into concrete story characters like Ann the Ant, whose name and identity help children remember the sound of the letter. |
| The brain works with feedback loops. For example, babies learning to talk, may say "ma". Then Mom gives the feedback, "YES! MAMA!" Pretty soon, baby is saying "mama". |
 RWT!™ provides clear, non-judgmental visual and auditory feedback. Children try to sound-out and spell words in phrases and stories. If they make a mistake, the program helps them by saying the sound, and showing them which finger to use and where to find the letter on the keyboard. |
| The brain perceives patterns and generates rules about them. |
RWT!™ uses regularly spelled words that follow the rules, and so establishes a strong pattern of letter-sound associations. |
| The brain performs multiple tasks simultaneously (parallel distributed processing). |
Unlike other programs, RWT!™ integrates phoneme awareness, phonics, reading, writing, spelling, and typing, all at once. |
| Memory is enhanced by emotions. |
The storytellers associate sounds with emotion - Ann the Acrobatic Ant cries "aaaa" when she falls, and Issa says "iiiick" when she is disgusted. The story is emotionally engaging as children embark on an adventure to "save the letters" from Vexor. |
| The brain develops fluency with practice. At first, learning is conscious and laborious, gradually becoming automatic. When the mechanics of writing or reading become unconscious, the cortex allocates more attention to the meaning of what is being written and read. |
Children need to connect 40 speech sounds with their letters to learn the alphabet code. In RWT!™, children sound-out and type hundreds of words. The more practice they have, the more automatic those associations become. |
| Motor memory is a separate, very enduring brain system. Once we learn to ride a bike, we don't forget. |
RWT!™ uses motor memory. Simple keystrokes are linked to sounds and letters. As the fingers begin to learn their tasks automatically, children get into the fun of writing. |
 The brain processes wholes AND parts simultaneously. |
Using RWT!™, children develop fluency with phonics (the parts) in a meaningful (whole language) context. |
| In the process of reading, the brain decodes the parts (letters and words) and decodes the meaning of the whole (sentences). In the process of writing, the meaning is already known, but the brain must now both encode AND decode: Children encode the meaning (their story) into the alphabetic code (letters and words), AND decode (read the words and sentence back to themselves.) |
By taking a writing-to-read approach, RWT!™ capitalizes on the fact that writing is a higher order brain function. In other words, writing uses more of the brain. Children are reading as they write, and writing as they read. Their brains are continually encoding and decoding. |
