Early Learning & Literacy Tools

READY! FOR KINDERGARTEN: http://www.readyforkindergarten.org/

 “READY! for Kindergarten™ classes encourage parents to talk, sing, read and play with their child in simple ways that foster essential pre-literacy, pre-math and social-emotional skills. Age-appropriate activities are designed to begin at birth and continue through age five. The curriculum is based on current research and replicates what parents and educators of successful students have done for years.”

 “Developed in 2002 by the Children's Reading Foundation and the Kennewick (WA) School District, READY! for Kindergarten offers age-appropriate trainings, targets and tools for parents and caregivers of children birth to five years that ensure children success in school.” Ready! For Kindergarten covers three categories:  Language and Literacy; Math and Reasoning; Social and Emotional, and focuses on 26 measurable skills within these three categories. Within the Language and Literacy category, there are 12 targets. These targets are: Seeing Clearly; Naming Letter Shapes; Matching Letter Shapes; Recognizing Sight Words; Singing, Chanting, Rhyming; Saying Letter Sounds; Saying Sounds in Words; Comprehending Books; Knowing Print Concepts; Hearing Spoken Words; Developing Verbal Skills; Printing First Name

Within the Language and Literacy targets, there different measurable expectations for each age group: birth-1, 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, and 4-5. For example, in Saying Sounds in Words, “I can say the last word in familiar rhymes, with assistance,” (Ages 1-2) to “I repeat the beginning sound of words. I clap or jump the syllables in familiar words, with assistance. I make up nonsense rhymes,” (Ages 3-4).

GET READY TO READ: http://www.getreadytoread.org/

A service of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, “Get Ready to Read! is designed to support educators, parents, and young children in the development of early literacy skills in the years before kindergarten.” The resources and information provided “promote skill-building, communication between adults, and ways to address concerns.”

Under Skill Building Activities, Get Ready provides 36 activity cards, free and full-text. Get the activity cards here. Within the 26 activities are three different skill levels- beginning, making progress, and ready to read. Parents should start at the level most equivalent to their child’s skills and knowledge. Get Ready also provides a screening tool, although they do not provide it free of charge.

Under Early Learning & Childhood basics, Get Ready provides parents a crash course in early learning and early literacy, featuring articles, videos discussing the important of building skills- and how to build these skills with children, and strategies and resources for parents to help build readers.  

ZERO TO THREE: http://www.zerotothree.org/

Zero to Three is provided by the National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families. “The ZERO TO THREE Policy Center is a nonpartisan, research-based resource for federal and state policymakers and advocates on the unique developmental needs of infants and toddlers. The Policy Center brings to bear ZERO TO THREE’s more than 30 years of research-based expertise on infant and toddler development to ensure that public policies reflect best practices and current research in support of our nation’s very young children.”

In their School Readiness Section, they group their age categories into 0-12 months, 12-24 months, and 24-36 months. Under school readiness, they focus on four areas: language and literacy, thinking skills, self-control, and self-confidence. Each section focus on what parents and caregivers can do to support the growth and development of specific skills; provides specific, yet easy to do parent-child activities, and has some frequently asked questions for each area of emphasis.

In their Early Literacy and Language Tips and Tools, they have a host of articles including reviewing current research, how parents can help build basic early literacy skills, and the importance of early interaction with children in building these skills. The Tips and Tools can be found here.

CENTER FOR EARLY LEARNING LITERACY: http://www.earlyliteracylearning.org

The Center for Early Literacy Learning (CELL) has “resources for early childhood intervention practitioners, parents, and other caregivers of children, birth to five years of age, with identified disabilities, developmental delays, and those at-risk for poor outcomes.”

CELL features three different practice guides- for parents, for teachers, and another with adaptations for children with disabilities. Each of these practice guides have resources divided into three age groups—infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. All of these practice guides are available, free of charge, in full-text format.

Ten different videos, directed towards both parents and teachers, show both groups how to use the resources and knowledge on the site. These videos range from 5 minutes to 17 minutes, with the longest video on how to have interactive/dialogic reading with 4 and 5 year olds. See the videos here.

The site also features Practice Guides for Parents in Spanish- however, this is buried in English-text and menus, and even the themes of each guide, as well as the age groups, are in English, not Spanish.

King County Library System’s Ready to Read was the most overt in listing appropriate books to foster early literacy skills.

READY TO READ: http://www.kcls.org/parents/kidsandreading/readytoread/index.cfm

“The READ TO ME Program encourages parents to read books to their babies. Through workshops parents experience the pleasures in picture books for children and learn to make the reading fun for everyone. These video clips were produced by the READ TO ME Program. KCLS Children's Librarians can provide free Early Literacy presentations for groups of parents, caregivers and early child professionals. The length of the presentation can be tailored to fit your needs and STARS-approved education credit can be provided.”

In Ready to Read’s Guide, fifteen different picture books are featured, and with each of them, prepares the parent for reading the book with their child, coaches the parent through dialogic reading by giving them questions to posse, gives them games which play off the language in the book, gives the parents ideas of how to play with the child based on ideas in the book, and lists age appropriate books about similar topics or subjects.  See the guide here.

The site also includes age-specific booklists, information on reading aloud to children, coaching on how to select books for children, some easy songs and fingerplays to do with children, and specific books which are good for fingerplays with children.

COMPARISONS

In reviewing Ready! for Kindergarten, Get Ready to Read, Zero to Three, Center for Early Learning Literacy, and King County’s Ready to Read program, there were differences, advantages, and disadvantages to each resource. All of these resources clearly place research-based practices at the heart of their programs—no resource and accompanying tools had an advantage in this respect.

Zero to Thirty features videos of parents and children learning the described skills- a unique attribute. See videos here. Zero to Thirty also featured a number of resources, including videos, in Spanish. However, the main site was in English, and contained Spanish-language resources. The likelihood of primary Spanish-speakers wading through the English content seems remote.

CELL features audio and visual podcasts of their Parent Practice guides. As the resource is designed with those with disabilities in mind, it makes sense to provide accessible formats for parents and educators as well! See and hear the CELLcasts here. The practice guides for parents and practitioners are both incredibly text-heavy. Having an alternative format, in this case audio and visual formats, makes trudging through the content somewhat less daunting.

King County’s Read to Me site is incredibly text heavy; even its video page doesn’t feature pictures or descriptions of the videos- only hyperlinks. King County, however, provides the best in using specific books to build specific early literacy skills with children- this was very unique among the resources reviewed. See the guide here. However, the booklists featured, independent of the guide, didn’t feature item records that were linked to the library’s catalog. While the lists are helpful, they have very little digital functionality.

What I found most unique about Get Ready was the inclusion of checklists for parents, in both English and Spanish, for the home, for the classroom, and for family child care. Out of these three, the most poignant is the Home Literacy Environment Checklist, which strives to make parents more aware of their children’s surrounding and their own behavior. Get it here. This is a marked departure from many other resources, as most focus on what the child should be learning, rather than what the parents should be doing to support their children’s literacy skill development. Within the checklist, adults must answer what they or another adult do, such as “I or another adult in the house help my child learn nursery rhymes,” and what children see the adult doing, such as “My child sees me or another adult in the house reading books, magazines or the newspaper nearly every day”. King County featured these checklists, although they didn’t attribute them to Get Ready to Read.

The major advantage of READY! for Kindergarten is the use of instructors over a multi-year period; this strength is also the program’s limitation. The program is currently in 18 states and one province; however, most of the programs are in the State of Washington, where it was developed. While the program is expanding to different communities, somewhat rapidly, it is not widely available. It’s also the most costly—none of the materials are provided free of charge, unlike the other resources.

The advantage of the other four- Get Ready to Read, Zero to Three, Center for Early Learning Literacy, and King County’s Ready to Read program- is that so much material, in some cases all of the material, and content is provided free of charge, and has complementing articles and videos. The drawback is the utility of these four resources is entirely dependent of the motivation of the parents and practitioners to seek out this information and use it.