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What is Stride Ahead?

Stride Ahead is a study book, written for students who can read, but who have difficulty in understanding and comprehending written text.

We believe this is the result of their minds being too occupied with the mechanics of decoding the written language. It leaves them unable to give adequate attention to the meaning of the text.

Often these students become very adept at disguising their poor reading skills. They use ‘guesswork’ allied with contextual clues to get meaning. Because these ‘guesswork’ techniques hide a student’s poor reading skills, often their teachers are not even aware that the student has a problem.

In effect, they are on a ‘reading plateau’ from which they are unable to ‘climb higher’ or further improve their reading ability.

For many such students, they often remain on this ‘reading plateau’ throughout their school careers and on into adult life.

The consequences of this possibly undiscovered difficulty is that the student never fully realises their potential and capacity for learning, either at school or into adult life.

“As a teacher, I have learnt so much from Toe by Toe and Stride Ahead. As a parent, I have enjoyed the process and had the enormous satisfaction of watching my child blossom and take pride in her own achievement. The impact is far reaching. She has learnt not to give up and that even the most insurmountable problem can probably be overcome with the right ‘tools’, some hard work and a little support. We can never thank you enough.”
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Clare D. - Parent / Teacher, Aberdeenshire

How Stride Ahead Complements Toe By Toe

Toe By Toe’s success is due to the application of our unique and easy to use syllable division and the structured over-teaching of particular phonemes.

The aim of Stride Ahead is to make these phonemes from Toe By Toe so familiar to students that they are able to recognise them instantaneously, without concentrated mental effort. This frees them up to get on with the important process of actually understanding text.

Stride Ahead – The Importance of ‘Timing’

Careful timing is the key to success when using Stride Ahead.

Stride Ahead aims to make the decoding process of reading text an automatic, unthinking reflex and response. Only when a student can do this can they be free of cluttered thinking. When the student learns these good habits they can focus fully on the meaning of the text. These good habits are called ‘automacity’.

Automacity is best defined as: The ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit.

Timed practice is the best way to achieve automaticity. That is why Stride Ahead uses a structured series of timing targets. This encourages the student to think less about the minor details of a text. This frees them up to give more attention to the main objective of reading a text - understanding it and extracting meaning from it.


Who is Stride Ahead Designed For?

Let’s now consider who is Stride Ahead  best designed for.

School use

Students of all ages attend school and colleges to learn. To learn from text, you need the ability to read.

Being able to read without fully understanding the content, context and meaning of a text potentially disadvantages a student. It is absolutely critical that students can both understand and gain meaning from text. For fluent readers it is easy. It is as if the actual words are invisible. When reading, all they do is absorb information. However, there are many students who - although they have the necessary decoding skills to read - they still find reading a laborious, unrewarding activity.

Stride Ahead is the perfect tool to help these particular students. Studying Stride Ahead helps students to increasingly blank out the white noise of written text (that is, the minor details of a text). It is the worrying over the ‘minor detail’ of a text that distracts a student from achieving the main object of reading a text: understanding it and extracting meaning from it.

Stride Ahead aims to free them up from this distraction, giving them more time, desire and ability to understand a text and to extract more meaning from it. Developing and improving this skill is critical for everyone’s education. After all, isn’t exam success linked to a clear understanding of written questions?

The check list below offers a quick snapshot of who can best benefit from studying Stride Ahead.

We recommend:

  • That school students do not begin Stride Ahead until they have a reading age of 8½ years.
  • Stride Ahead for anyone who can read (decode) reasonably well.
  • That Toe By Toe students should start Stride Ahead ONLY once they have reached page 205 of Toe By Toe.
  • That even if students start studying Stride Ahead after reaching page 205 of Toe By Toe, they ABSOLUTELY MUST still complete ALL of the Toe By Toe manual.

Link with Toe By Toe

We are often asked how Stride Ahead should be used or integrated with Toe By Toe. Our recommendation is that students who are working through Toe By Toe should ONLY start to study Stride Ahead once they reach page 205  of Toe By Toe. By this page of Toe By Toe students have the necessary decoding skills are in place. It is the perfect time to introduce Stride Ahead for the student.

NB: Stride Ahead should NOT replace Toe By Toe if this option is applied. It is extremely important that Toe By Toe is completed to its very last page, its very last exercise.

If the student and tutor agree to studying both books simultaneously, we recommend using Toe By Toe and Stride Ahead on alternate study days.

Adult use of Stride Ahead

When asking ‘Who is Stride Ahead designed for?’, let’s not forget adults, either. Any adult with weak reading or poor comprehension skills can also benefit from studying Stride Ahead.