EarlyBird for Families

You will need to complete and submit a parental consent form so our EB Literacy Specialist has your permission to interact with your child during the game administration.

Download Parental Consent Form

The EarlyBird literacy screener is a game-based assessment tool that assesses specific skills. Screening is intended to “catch” reading difficulties early so that children can receive timely and targeted intervention and prevent reading and comprehension challenges down the road.

EarlyBird is the most comprehensive assessment available for kindergartners, assessing the key literacy milestones shown to be most predictive of later reading success. Coupling the latest research with cutting edge technology, EarlyBird identifies children at substantial risk for dyslexia and other reading struggles.

When you sign up for EarlyBird, we will send you a proprietary login code that you will use to access the game on the device of your choice.

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction.

Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge Dyslexia (or word-level reading difficulty) is predominantly characterized by a core deficit in phonological processing (the ability to recognize and manipulate speech sounds), which results in impairments in decoding (“sounding out” words), spelling, and word recognition.

These impairments almost always lead to difficulties in reading fluency and comprehension, reduced vocabulary, lower content knowledge, and a decline in overall school performance.

Dyslexia impacts children in different ways. For preschool aged children, signs can include:

• Mispronouncing words, or having trouble with letter placement in a word.
• Rhyming difficulties
• Challenges or processing delays around naming or identifying common objects
• Trouble following directions or remembering sequencing (ie multi-step directions)

For kids in Kindergarten through 2nd grade, signs can include:

• Confusing the order of letters in words
• Struggling with reading and writing, often more slowly than peers
• Trouble following directions or remembering sequencing (ie multi-step directions)
• Difficulty with spelling
• Forming letters the wrong way round (e.g. writing ‘b’ instead of ‘d’)

For more information on the signs and symptoms of dyslexia, please visit www.understood.org

The report is prepared specifically for your family by our specially trained literacy experts. They will share the results and help you understand the best next steps to take based on the findings: engaging activities to play with your child to build on their strengths or help with their weaknesses; a plan of action customized based on your child’s results – with recommendations on resources that will be helpful; help navigating the pathway of next steps; and an understanding of how your child compares to children across the country.

1. Upon signing up, you’ll set a time to meet with a specially trained literacy expert who will help you set up the game for your child
2. Your child will play the interactive game via remote administration from the literacy specialist. The results will be available within a week.
3. You will schedule a family conference with the literacy specialist to review the scores as well as personalized action items and resources.
4. The final report will be emailed to you for future reference. We will have additional content and resources on the site, so continue to check back in with us!

Cognitive-behavioral research has revealed that there are early literacy skill deficits that represent red flags for dyslexia risk and can be measured at a preschool age.  Many intervention studies have shown that with appropriate and intense early intervention (i.e., in K through second grade), the overwhelming majority of students will develop early reading skills and exhibit word reading accuracy scores that are at least at the 30th percentile.

Accurate and automatic word reading skills are vital for developing independent reading comprehension. The goal of screening and identification is to provide students with the preventative and targeted intervention they need so foundational reading problems do not compound over time.

Literacy screening is a process for identifying children at risk of later reading problems. Typically undertaken in elementary of middle school, elementary and middle school, screening measures may be paper and pencil tasks administered directly by the specialist (ie teacher, learning specialist, neuropsychologist) or computer-administered. The EarlyBird screener is an interactive digital game that is an individually administered formal diagnostic test that compares your child’s score to a larger “sample size” of same-grade peers. EarlyBird developed a dyslexia screener for children as early as Kindergarten – 1st grade level that doesn’t require that your child can read. It gives parents the ability to know if their child is at risk for dyslexia during that early learning window when intervention is most effective. Created by leading researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research, and validated at Boston Children’s Hospital.

At this time, EarlyBird is only available for children ages 4-8 (or grades K- 1st), but feel free to leave your information here and we will keep you updated about EarlyBird’s plans to expand.