Our Learning Success Program
Lisa Harp, the founder of Harp Learning Institute and Bravo! Reading, created a learning success program that helps kids overcome learning disabilities like dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, and autism.
The Harp Learning System is a research-driven multi-sensory learning program that helps kids overcome learning challenges. The five steps of the system ensure that the child is treated as a whole, not just bits and pieces. The power of the program lies in its comprehensive nature.
As your child moves through the seven levels of the Harp Learning System, you’ll watch as confidence increases. Soon, learning leaps are taken and grades inch up. You’ll feel pride and joy as grades soar and tests are passed with ease. Even better, when learning is no longer a struggle, smiles will abound for all!
Cognitive Skills:
Unique learners often have a challenging time processing information. There are numerous reasons for this lack of cognitive processing. Here’s the good news. With specific, targeted exercises that cross the midline of the body, students can process information correctly and easily.
Our learning success program is rich in brain-based learning. Kids love doing Magic Eights, Mirrors, Cross Crawls, Directionality, and Perceptual activities. Even better, these exercises give learners a strong cognitive foundation.
As kids perform the exercises, they build new neural pathways in the brain. Step-by-step, students build a strong learning foundation. This in turn, keeps cognitive skills sharp and focused. And as a result, it equates to a happy, confident student who achieves excellent grades and enjoys going to school.
Visual Processing:
We take in light with our eyes but process visual information in our brains. Learners who process visual information incorrectly do not perceive information as expected. They may skip letters or lines when reading or view letters or numbers as backward. diagonal, or upside down. These students might perceive horizontal lines as diagonal or vertical. They might have double vision, or have a difficult time holding images (such as letters and numbers) in visual memory.
Often these poor visual processors cannot distinguish the subtle differences between the shapes of letters and numbers. This results in guessing, which is not efficient. Guessing at words leads to poor reading abilities, low grades, and failure to pass tests. Students with visual processing issues have a difficult time decoding words, reading sight words, memorizing math facts and recalling numbers.
Our learning success program incorporates a visual component. Students are then able to perceive and process visual information correctly. This leads to not only academic success but life success.
Auditory Processing:
The brain is also the central processing station for auditory processing. We take in sounds with our ears, but process auditory information in the brain. Students who process auditory information incorrectly have a difficult time following directions.
These students may not hear the endings of words or sentences. They might hear only every second or third word in a sentence, or fail to filter out environmental noises. Because of this, these students are highly distracted and have a difficult time focusing, especially in a traditional classroom. Often they are misdiagnosed as having ADD/ADHD.
At Harp, we teach our students to “hear” correctly. We practice processing beginnings and endings of sounds and words. Students practice the subtle nuances of differences between sounds, words, and phrases. We have them pick out missing sounds and phrases from short and then lengthy passages. These students learn to follow auditory directions!
And this relates to better understanding of what the teacher is instructing and increased grades and organization. However, students can learn to “filter” out extraneous noises. This helps them focus and retain information.
Memory Building:
At Harp, we immediately begin building up students’ memory skills. This is crucial for test taking and recalling math facts. Also, memory skills play a part in classroom participation and discussions. Learners also must recall multi-step math steps, writing essays, and spell words correctly.
That’s a lot!
Students can’t be expected to have a strong working memory without first possessing basic auditory and visual memory skills. This helps them hold and manipulate letters, numbers, and images in their minds.
This in turn leads to academic success. No more homework battles. Your child recalls information with ease and consequently aces tests.
Academics:
The Harp Learning Institute incorporates academics including reading, writing, spelling and math at every session. At first, students learn with a hands-on, multi-sensory approach, even in reading! Students are out of their seats and touching letters and sounds or using bingo markers using cross-lateral movements.
Then students move on to Orton-Gillingham based instruction that is multi-sensory. This means that students use visual, auditory, and kinesthetic channels where units of sound are learned. In addition, this is done in a sequential, cumulative manner. This keeps readers from guessing at words as they gain strength in decoding. (See Bravo! Reading to learn about the reading program we use). Students also learn sight words through pictures, memory activities, and games.
Mainstream Academics Don’t Work for Nontraditional Learners
Students learn to write with activities like dictation, writing units of sounds, and learning to write a sentence. From there, students write well organized paragraphs.
Even young learners or those formerly diagnosed with dysgraphia or dyslexia are writing legible, well developed paragraphs. With this step-by-step system, we get results! Our teens are writing essays that not only improve grades but help with college admission and course work.
At Harp Learning Institute, we know there is a hierarchy to learning, especially in math. It is sequential. You must have one building block to get to the other. All too often, students feel the pain of being rushed through basic math skills. They’re unable to keep up because they are missing skills. This isn’t because they don’t understand the concepts but because they are missing lower level skills. We asses our math students’ needs and find out what math gaps exist and then we systematically fill those in.
For instance, we have found that many students struggle in Algebra. This is often because students are weak in fractions and don’t know their multiplication facts. When we use our Bravo! Multiplication System, students learn math facts quickly by the same cross-lateral motion with bingo markers. To top it off, they have fun along the way!