Garcia Elementary is equipped with a Bridges' (SOI) Learning Lab. These labs target students who are not reaching their academic potential or those who have not been successful on the state assessment tests.

Cognition before content: Bridges focuses on the quality of students. Are they able to think? Are they prepared to learn? Can their abilities be improved? Bridges assesses, profiles, and develops cognition and perception-the abilities and skills that are essential to the classroom- enabling learners to become quality students.

The success of Bridges/SOI can be traced directly to fundamental science:

• intelligence is not fixed at birth
• multiple intelligences can be developed
• a student's "teachability" can be nurtured at any age

Learning is dependent on more than just the teacher and the curriculum, but the student and his or her ability to learn.

SOI is founded on the fact that the brain is the cornerstone of education. If students aren't able to process, or retain information, it doesn't matter what you teach them or how you teach them, they're not going to learn.

"D" students-even "B" students-very often have a desire to succeed that exceeds their ability to learn. They may be strong in some areas and weak in others. They may have 20/20 eyesight, but can't read left to right or compute right to left. They may work well with close supervision, but they have trouble working individually.

The Bridges SOI/IPP program works to improve attention span, memory, comparison/contrast thinking, eye-hand coordination, systems reasoning and other skills essential to the learning process, helping students perform better in school and life.

For more information please visit www.soisystems.com