Davis® Learning Strategies Workshop
The Davis® Learning Strategies programme was developed to give Kindergarten through Third Grade classroom teachers unique strategies for providing more effective reading instruction and for giving their students life long skills in “how to learn.”
It is intended to be a supplement to the regular curriculum, to provide additional preparation and support that will help children naturally develop strong reading fluency and comprehension skills.
Davis® Learning Strategies were created by Ronald D. Davis, author of The Gift of Dyslexia. Sharon Pfeiffer, a teacher with more than 20 years of classroom experience, supervised research and development. She conducted pilot programmes in several local San Francisco Bay Area classrooms from 1994-1999. At first, the goal was to reach children with dyslexia and related learning disabilities before they fell behind by adapting the Davis Dyslexia Correction® methods for school children under the age of eight.
During the five years of pilot studies, we discovered that the Davis methods helped all children enhance and improve their reading and language arts skills. Followup showed that the Davis® Learning Strategies not only prevented special education placement in later school years, but also increased the number of students qualifying for gifted education placement. Implementation of the methods benefited all students no matter what their learning styles or reading level. Teachers found that strong readers become stronger in language and grammar skills and weaker readers begin to read effortlessly.
Programme purpose
Filling the gap for literacy success
Why do Schools and Teachers Need this Programme?
Reading is a complex process that involves development of many skills. In order to become a fluent reader, the child must not only “break the code” of reading by learning to connect letters to corresponding sound, but the child must also develop whole word recognition skills and an ability to comprehend and make sense of the words as they are read.
In the past decades, many schools have implemented strong and effective phonics programmes. Yet many children continue to struggle when it comes to learning basic sight words or reading orally.
In order to become good readers, children must also develop transitional skills that will help them learn to read with recognition and understanding as they encounter familiar words, reserving their decoding skills for newly introduced vocabulary.
With the Davis tools, students are given visual and kinesthetic strategies to add to the process of mastering first their letters and numbers, and then to reading and understanding basic sight words. This process is often surprisingly easy for students who are primarily visual or kinesthetic learners, even though they may be struggling with learning phonics. More important, by teaching reading to all learning modalities, the process of learning to read is enhanced for all students.
Programme elements
The Davis® Learning Strategies Programme begins with students learning the Davis Focusing Skills. These skills provide students with the self-directed ability to be physically and mentally focused on the learning task at hand.
Through Davis Symbol Mastery®, students learn to master alphabet, punctuation marks, and basic sight words with clay modeling. This provides a simple, easy, and fun alternative to pencil-paper activities and drill exercises.
Mastery of Basic Words provides all types of learners to truly master the spelling, pronunciation (sound), and meaning of the most common words encountered in reading. The majority of these are familiar to all teachers as the “Dolch List.”
Davis Reading Exercises provide a method for instructing students in word recognition and comprehension. This reading method can be used alone or as a supplement to a phonics programme.
Davis® Learning Strategies are an effective and efficient way to provide the student with necessary reading skills and to develop the beginning reader into an accomplished reader by the end of the third grade.
