Entering CP is a pivotal moment, a door that every child pushes to enter the fascinating world of reading. As teachers, you are the privileged guides of this great adventure. You know better than anyone that learning to read is not just about recognizing letters and sounds. It is a complex construction, a building whose foundations are invisible to the naked eye: cognitive skills. At Dynseo, we have spent years studying these foundations. We believe that to build a solid and confident reader, one must first ensure that the ground on which they build is stable and rich.
It is with this philosophy that we have developed our tools, including our app COCO PENSE and COCO BOUGE. Our goal is not to replace syllabic or global reading methods, but to come upstream, to prepare the child's brain to receive this learning. Imagine that you want to build a house. Before raising the walls (the words) and laying the roof (the understanding of texts), you must dig solid foundations and pour a robust concrete slab. These foundations are working memory, attention, planning, and mental flexibility. If these bases are fragile, no matter how beautiful the house is, it risks cracking at the first difficulty. Our mission is to help you strengthen these foundations in each of your students, in a playful, targeted, and individualized way, so that the house of reading is solid for life.
When we observe a student struggling with a text, our first instinct is often to focus on decoding. Do they confuse sounds? Do they have trouble blending syllables? While these aspects are crucial, they are often just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath lies a whole network of cognitive processes that, if not sufficiently developed, hinder the entire reading mechanism. We have focused our approach on strengthening these foundational skills.
Working Memory, the Pillar of Comprehension
Working memory is like a mental slate on which the child juggles information. To read a simple sentence like "The little cat drinks milk," the student must:
- Decode "The".
- Keep it in memory.
- Decode "little".
- Keep it in memory while remembering "The".
- Make the connection: "The little".
- Continue this process until the end of the sentence.
Once the sentence is decoded, they must still remember the beginning to understand its overall meaning. If their working memory is overloaded or underperforming, the first words fade before they reach the end. They decode a series of words but do not read a meaningful sentence. This is an immense source of frustration that can lead to discouragement. Our games in COCO PENSE are designed to train this ability to retain and manipulate information over a short period, in a gradual and fun way.
Attention, the Beacon that Guides Reading
Reading requires intense concentration. We distinguish several types of attention, all essential to reading.
- Selective attention: This is the ability to focus on letters and words while ignoring visual distractions (an image on the page, a classmate moving) or auditory distractions (noise in the classroom). It is the beacon that remains fixed on the text.
- Sustained attention: This is attentional endurance, the ability to stay focused on a reading task for several minutes. Without it, the child "loses focus" after a few lines.
- Shared attention: This is necessary when the student must, for example, read an instruction and then complete the requested exercise, switching from one task to another.
An attention deficit can be mistakenly interpreted as a lack of will or laziness. In reality, the child struggles to keep their cognitive "beacon" lit and directed towards the page. We offer activities that exercise these different facets of attention, asking the child to spot targets, follow precise instructions, or stay focused despite distracting elements.
Executive Functions, the Architect of Meaning
Executive functions are the conductor of the brain. They allow us to plan, organize, adapt, and control our impulses. In the context of reading, they are omnipresent.
- Planning: How will I approach this text? I look at the title, the images, and prepare to read.
- Cognitive flexibility: I misread a word, the meaning of the sentence is strange. I must be able to go back, correct myself, and try another pronunciation. A cognitively rigid child will remain stuck on their first mistake.
- Inhibition: This is the ability to curb impulsive responses. For example, not guessing the end of a word from its first letters, but taking the time to decode it to the end.
These skills are complex and develop throughout childhood. Training them specifically through logic, strategy, or problem-solving games gives the student the tools to become an active and strategic reader, rather than a simple passive decoder.
COCO PENSE: Our Tool for Building These Skills
Based on this observation, we did not want to create yet another reading app. We created COCO PENSE, a complete cognitive training environment, designed with professionals in neuropsychology and speech therapy. Our mascot, Coco the squirrel, accompanies children in a caring and stimulating universe. The goal is clear: to strengthen the brain to prepare it for all learning, with a particular focus on the prerequisites for reading.
A Playful and Adaptive Approach
The first lever of learning is motivation. A child only learns well if they want to learn. That is why all our exercises are presented in the form of short, colorful, and engaging games. It is not about doing "memory exercises," but about helping Coco find his acorns, follow a path, or reconstruct a drawing.
Above all, our application integrates an adaptive algorithm. The difficulty of the games automatically adjusts in real-time to the performance of each child. If a student succeeds, the level increases slightly to keep them in an optimal challenge zone. If they encounter difficulties, the game simplifies to avoid frustration and failure. Therefore, you do not have to worry about creating ability groups: the application does it for you, ensuring effortless pedagogical differentiation.
Targeted Games for Specific Skills
Each of the more than 30 games in our program has been designed to work on one or more specific cognitive skills, which are essential prerequisites for reading.
- For working memory, games like "The Conductor's Sequence" require memorizing and reproducing increasingly long sound or visual sequences. This directly trains the ability to retain sounds and syllables to form a word.
- For attention, "The Intruder" requires spotting a different element among others, which strengthens selective attention and visual processing speed, crucial skills for quickly discriminating letters (b/d, p/q).
- For executive functions, logic games like "The Color Sudoku" or "The Maze Path" develop planning and mental flexibility, teaching the child to anticipate, try strategies, and correct themselves.
This approach allows for breaking down the complex task of reading into a multitude of elementary cognitive bricks and reinforcing them one by one, through play.
More than a Game: Monitoring for the Teacher
COCO PENSE is not just an application for students. It is a true pedagogical management tool for you, the teacher. With a secure and user-friendly dashboard, you can track the progress of each student and your class as a whole. You can see at a glance the strengths and areas of weakness for each cognitive skill (memory, attention, logic, etc.).
This objective data is valuable. It allows you to better understand the source of a student's difficulties. A child who struggles with reading and whose working memory scores are consistently low on the platform gives you a concrete and targeted action point, much more precise than a simple "they have trouble reading."
Detecting and Supporting Difficulties, Especially DYS Disorders
One of the major contributions of our approach is its ability to serve as an early detection tool for cognitive weaknesses, which can be a sign of a learning disorder, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, or attention deficit disorder (ADHD).
When the Game Reveals a Difficulty
A student with dyslexia will often, in addition to their phonological difficulties, have weaker working memory and information processing speed. A student with ADHD will show very fluctuating performance on attention games. By observing the cognitive profiles that emerge on your COCO PENSE dashboard, you do not diagnose – that is not your role – but you collect objective and factual information.
This information can allow you to:
- Implement targeted pedagogical adaptations in class.
- Alert the RASED or school psychologist with concrete elements.
- Discuss with parents using precise data, thus facilitating referral for a speech therapy or neuropsychological assessment if necessary.
The application becomes an ally to ensure no student is left behind, acting preventively at the first signs of difficulty.
Our Commitment: Training to Act Better
We know that tools, no matter how effective, are nothing without the competence of those who use them. A well-equipped and informed teacher is the best asset for a struggling student. That is why we have developed a comprehensive training offer for primary school teachers. Our training "Identifying and Supporting DYS Disorders in Primary School" has been specifically designed to give you the keys to understanding and acting in the face of these disorders that affect more and more students.
We believe it is essential to demystify DYS disorders. They are not a fatality, but a different neurological functioning that requires adapted pedagogical approaches. Our training, available online, allows you to train at your own pace to better understand these students and implement effective strategies in your classroom.
Training Content: Keys for the Classroom
Our training course is resolutely practical. We start from the latest advances in neuroscience to arrive at directly applicable advice in your daily life. You will learn to:
- Recognize the warning signs of various DYS disorders (dyslexia, dysorthographia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, ADHD).
- Understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying each disorder.
- Implement simple and effective adaptations: adapt materials, use compensatory tools, modify instructions, evaluate differently.
- Communicate constructively with families and health professionals (speech therapists, psychomotor therapists, etc.).
This training is the essential complement to our applications. It allows you to interpret the data from COCO PENSE with relevance and to act appropriately.
Integrating COCO PENSE and COCO BOUGE into the CP Routine
We have designed our tools to integrate smoothly and simply into the organization of your class, without adding to your workload.
An Autonomous and Differentiated Workshop
The ideal format for using COCO PENSE is that of an autonomous workshop. While you work with a group on a specific skill (phonology, writing, etc.), another group of students can practice on tablets with the application. Short sessions of 15 to 20 minutes, two to three times a week, are sufficient to achieve significant results. The adaptive aspect of the application ensures that each student works at their own level, making it an excellent differentiation tool.
The Importance of Movement with COCO BOUGE
Our learning philosophy is holistic. We know that the brain does not function in isolation from the body. Numerous studies have proven the close link between physical activity and cognitive performance. A child who has moved is more attentive, more focused. That is why we created COCO BOUGE, the physical counterpart of COCO PENSE. This application offers short, fun physical exercise programs, designed by psychomotor therapists, to be done in class. Integrating a short COCO BOUGE session before a reading or writing session can "wake up" the students' brains and make them more available for learning.
Towards a Global Approach to Learning
In conclusion, our proposal for CP classes is not a reading method, but a global approach that aims to equip each child cognitively and physically. By using COCO PENSE, you are not just teaching them to read; you are giving them the brain tools to learn to read more easily and effectively. You are solidifying the foundations so that the structure of reading, and all other learning, can rise high and straight. By training with us on DYS disorders, you become an expert capable of spotting cracks in these foundations and remedying them before the wall collapses. We are convinced that by acting on these roots of learning, we will enable all students, without exception, to push open the door to the world of writing with confidence and pleasure.
The article "COCO PENSE in CP: developing reading through cognitive play" highlights the importance of playful learning for young children. In a similar context, another interesting article to explore is "Solving problems while having fun: the must-try thinking games". This article discusses how thinking games can stimulate cognitive abilities while providing a fun and engaging experience, which is essential for children's intellectual development.
