• When you understand something, the mind is doing two jobs simultaneously: It's dealing with the words you read...AND...it's creating a mental picture which becomes the anchor and the organizer of your thought. (If you have not seen the presentation on the Home page, Why People Have Problems With Comprehension>, you may want to do so before you continue.)

• Individuals who have difficulty with comprehension frequently have problems making mental pictures. It's not that they can't make a mental picture (although many times they will tell you that)...It's that they can read words faster than they can create, change and adapt their mental pictures.

• MindPrime's IdeaChain program teaches an individual to become more efficient at mental imaging so they can process information more efficiently and understand as they read.

• The BIGGEST PROBLEM you have in helping another person with comprehension is that you cannot see their thinking and they cannot see yours. How do you help your child when you are not sure what they're thinking right now? What do they have and what do they not understand?
• You must find a common frame of reference, a language that your child clearly understands, so that what you teach sticks permanently.
• If you are feeling extremely frustrated about how to help, you have a lot of company! Many parents and teachers begin to feel that somehow it is their fault that the child is not understanding and remembering. The frustration of both parent and child can put undue pressure on the learning process.

IdeaChain gives you specific language to coach your child to develope greater understanding. IdeaChain starts your son or daughter at a point where he or she can be successful.

It contains all the material you need to complete the program. We also encourage you to apply the lesson material to homework study and assignments as soon as possible.

Here's what you get with each IdeaChain program lesson...

• An Overview to get you off to a quick
  start and give you background on the comprehension issues.
  
• The Lesson Notes highlight your role
  in the lesson and tell you specifically what to do.
  
• The Student Orientation helps you
  explain to your son or daughter how IdeaChain works.
  
• The Tracking Chart gives you a place
  to keep a record of your child's progress.
  
• Other Activities are family orientated
  activities that help you reinforce comprehension principles
  outside the lesson.
  
• Teacher Notes are designed to keep
  your child's teacher informed about what you are doing at home,
  if that is appropriate.

The Picture Stage

What You Do...
• Use simple activities with photographs to see in- depth and remember.
• Get a window into your student's thinking by watching how the student approaches the picture activities. You clearly see what is missing or how the student is jumping around.
• Ask specific questions as spelled out in the IdeaChain program, to stimulate the student's organization of information.
• Build summaries that easily evolve from the concrete picture activity.

Outcome
• The student begins to see full, rich details, a skill which pays off in writing assignments as well as in reading.
• The student learns how to organize information in a picture and describe it in a clear, precise way.
  
• The student begins to express summaries that pull together the main points of a picture or concrete scene.
  
• These skills - seeing richness of detail, organizing and summarizing - are crucial reading skills which are extremely difficult to teach in the abstract. Using the IdeaChain Reading Comprehension process, you can begin to summarize accurately in a matter of weeks.

With these scripted activities the student builds a frame of reference used to clarify communications when they get tangled up or fragmented.

The Mental Smapshot Stage

What You Do...
• Transfer all strategies learned in the Picture/Concrete Stage to building mental still-pictures without the support of concrete pictures or objects. This is a BIG step for the child
  to generate his or her own full mental picture. Why build a mental still-picture or snapshot? Because generating the kind of mental movie most people create when reading a book is far too complex at this stage of development. Mental snapshots are the first step toward building a mental movie.
  
• Clear up directional issues such as right and left. Check that your child is solid on how to describe the relationships between various items in their mental picture.
  
• Continue to stress richness of detail, organization and summaries.

Outcome

• Build organized mental pictures of simple concepts.
  
• Develop summaries of single-concept mental pictures.
  
• Use mental snapshots to build and retain definitions for history, science or reading school studies.



These skills are the beginning of spontaneous mental imaging. The are totally creative in that the individual makes all the decisions about what goes into the mental picture. After some practice the individual can make changes to and rearrange a mental picture.

The Reading Stage

What You Do...
• Begin to build mental images from written text.
  
• Stop the eye from bouncing right over the words. Use markers in a specific strategy to pull the eye to the words needed to build a mental image.
  
• Begin active reading by separating the author's meaning from the elaboration in an individual's mental picture. (Yes, even young children are able to do this with your coaching.)
  
• Begin answering factual and inferential questions using mental images built from reading.

Outcome

Begin to visualize directly from text. The goal of developing mental imaging is to visualize "on the fly" in real time. Visualizing supports developing meaning as you read. Noticing richness of detail and organizing information as you read leads to the ability to summarize, make inferences and remember more. The more strategies used, the stronger they become.