Learning Strategies
SIM encompasses more than 50 specific Learning Strategies that can help students overcome specific learning difficulties that impede literacy, from identifying words in text to completing assignments on time to writing complete essays.
Students use SIM Learning Strategies to help them understand information and solve problems. Students who do not know or use good learning strategies often learn passively and ultimately fail in school. SIM Learning Strategy instruction focuses on making students active learners.
Math
Addition Facts 10 - 18
Addition Facts 10 to 18 provides the materials you need to teach addition facts using the concrete-representational-abstract method of instruction, including specific teaching procedures and student materials for each lesson.
Addition with Regrouping
For some students, addition difficulties begin with single-digit basic facts, but, for others, problems emerge when the curriculum progresses to multi-digit addition, especially if regrouping is involved. When students struggle with computation and word problems that require regrouping, specialized instruction is needed.
Addition Within 20
This strategy is for students who may have memorized some addition facts, but are not fluent in addition facts with sums between 10 and 20, do not show an understanding of addition and its relation to subtraction, or have enough number knowledge or flexibility to solve unknown addition problems.
Division Facts 0 to 81
Division Facts 0 to 81 provides all of the materials you need to teach division facts using the concrete-representational-abstract method of instruction. The manual outlines specific teaching procedures for each lesson and includes student tests, progress charts, practice sheets, and more.
Multiplication Facts 0 to 81
The Strategic Math Series focuses on how to teach basic math facts and operations to students of any age. Content is built upon the concrete-representational-abstract method of instruction. In this approach, understanding of mathematics is developed through the use of concrete objects, representational drawings, and an easy-to-learn strategy that turns all students into active problem solvers.
Performance and Self-Determination
Possible Selves Strategy
Possible Selves is designed to increase student motivation by having students examine their futures and think about goals that are important to them. Students think about and describe their hoped-for possible selves, expected possible selves, and feared possible selves. They set goals, create plans, and work toward their goals as part of this program.
Self-Advocacy Strategy
The Self-Advocacy Strategy helps students prepare for and participate in education or transition planning conferences. Students learn to determine and list their perceived strengths, areas in which they need to improve or learn, education and transition goals, needed accommodations, and more. They then use steps of the strategy to share their lists during conferences, listen and respond to others, ask questions, and communicate their goals.
Reading
Inference Strategy
The Inference Strategy helps older students make inferences about information they have read and answer inferential questions. Students learn to identify key words in questions or invent their own questions to help them search for important information as they read a passage, determine what type of question they need to answer, think about what they already know about a topic, find clues in the reading passage that will help them answer the questions, look for additional information, and answer the question.
Paraphrasing Strategy
The Paraphrasing Strategy is designed to help students focus on the most important information in a passage and to improve students' recall of main ideas and specific facts. Students read short passages of materials, identify the main idea and details, and rephrase the content in their own words.
Self-Questioning Strategy
The Self-Questioning Strategy helps students create their own motivation for reading. Students create questions in their minds, predict the answers to those questions, search for the answers to those questions as they read, and paraphrase the answers to themselves.
Understanding Academic Language Strategy
Many learners struggle to understand academic texts. To improve comprehension, students need to recognize how words and phrases form well-structured sentences, understand the roles of active and passive voice, and see how connectives signal relationships between ideas. They must also grasp the importance of pronouns. The Understanding Academic Language Strategy uses the four-step TEXT Strategy to provide teachers with a framework for teaching these skills.
Visual Imagery Strategy
The Visual Imagery Strategy is a reading comprehension strategy for creating mental movies of narrative passages. Students visualize the scenery, characters, and action and describe the scenes to themselves as they read each sentence in a passage. Students use the strategy to improve their understanding and recall of specific facts and sequences.
Word Identification Strategy
The Word Identification Strategy (1996) provides a functional and efficient strategy to help challenged readers successfully decode and identify unknown words in their reading materials. The strategy is based on the premise that most words in the English language can be pronounced by identifying prefixes, suffixes, and stems and by following three short syllabication rules.
Word Mapping Strategy
The Word Mapping Strategy helps older students learn how to predict the meaning of unknown words. Students learn to identify prefixes, suffixes, and roots and practice predicting the meaning of words using those parts. They also learn to use four strategic steps to identify the parts of a word, determine the meaning of those parts, and predict the meaning of the word.
Studying
LINCS Vocabulary Strategy
The LINCS Vocabulary Strategy helps students learn the meaning of new vocabulary words using powerful memory-enhancement techniques. Strategy steps cue students to focus on critical elements of the concept; to use visual imagery, associations with prior knowledge, and key-word mnemonic devices to create a study card; and to study the card to enhance comprehension and recall of the concept.
Listening and Note-Taking Strategy
Listening and Note-Taking is an easy-to-learn strategy that helps students identify and quickly capture important information during a lecture, sort main ideas and details as they write, and study their notes to earn the best test grades possible. Listening and Note-Taking is suitable for instruction in core subject courses as well as supplemental skill-based classes.
Paired Associates Strategy
The Paired Associates Strategy helps students independently and in an organized way approach large bodies of information they need to master. Using the strategy, students identify pairs or groups of items that are important to learn, such as names and events, places and events, or names and accomplishments. They create study cards, create a mnemonic device for each card, and use the study cards to learn the information.
Writing
Edit Strategy
The EDIT Strategy enables students to find and correct errors on assignments created with a word processor. Students learn to enter their first draft into a word processing program, perform a spell check, run through the COPS Questions (which originate in the SIM Error Monitoring Strategy from 1982, and are related to capitalization, overall appearance, punctuation, and substance of the paper), and make the needed corrections.
Error Monitoring
The Error Monitoring Strategy can be used by students to independently detect and correct errors in their hand written work to increase the overall quality of their final product. Instruction stresses the importance of proof-reading written work for content and mechanical errors and eliminating those errors before work is submitted. This strategy also includes the development of personal strategies to avoid future errors.
Fundamentals in the Sentence Writing Strategy
Just because a sentence may be “simple” doesn’t mean it’s easy to write. Now you can shed some light on the subject (and the verb) of Simple Sentences with this effective instructional program. Students will learn basic grammar terms as well as how to write and check several types of Simple Sentences.
Paragraph Writing Strategy
With the Paragraph Writing Strategy, students learn to list ideas related to a topic; plan the point of view and verb tense to be used in the paragraph; plan the sequence in which ideas will be expressed; and write a variety of topic, detail, and clincher sentences.
Proficiency in the Sentence Writing Strategy
In Proficiency in the Sentence Writing Strategy instruction, students learn advanced sentence writing skills, including writing compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.