Kindergarten teachers are Brain Engineers. Yes, it’s true. Cognitive research has proven that in order to turn a pre-reading brain into a literate brain, neural pathways must be formed to connect specific areas of the brain. Let’s think like an engineer and follow the blueprint with these three easy steps.
With remote learning behind us, classroom teachers are still feeling the effects of learning loss. Skill deficits are real and teachers are being asked to teach at instructional levels that are below their normal grade level. EarlyBird assessment offers teachers proven tools to identify skill deficits, as well as the materials needed for targeted intervention. With EarlyBird, teachers can look at individual student scores, adjusting instruction for either whole or small groups to help close the gap from the COVID learning loss.
What if there was a way to reduce special education referrals while improving district reading scores? Or proactively identify the students who are at risk for dyslexia? Or provide instructional support for those students during the most effective intervention window? EarlyBird helps educators reduce special education referrals and improve district reading scores through early literacy screening and detection.
Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is the ability to quickly and accurately name objects, pictures, colors, letters or numbers. Measures of RAN offer an inside look at how well a student can retrieve stored data, which can help predict later reading fluency. The predictive quality leads some to think of RAN scores as a direct measure of reading abilities. This is not always the case.
To address the national reading crisis, as well as identify students at risk for dyslexia, the National Reading Panel identified the most effective components in teaching children to read: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Performance in each component is key to a student’s future literacy. Without a comprehensive assessment, teachers often miss deficits, which can lead to students not receiving the help they need.
Without a comprehensive approach to screening for foundational literacy skills, students often get overlooked — until until second grade, or sometimes even later. More complex texts mean they can no longer rely on memorizing words and picture clues. Deficits in decoding begin to surface. We frequently hear teachers say, “How did you get this far without knowing how to read?”
Kindergarten teachers administer a variety of assessments that can yield a wealth of information about their students’ skills. While planning for the 2021-22 school year, educational leaders in Dedham Public Schools (DPS) decided to take a fresh look at their approach to early literacy assessment.
EarlyBird Education, developer of the EarlyBird game-based early literacy assessment, has raised $3.5 million in funding, led by venture capital firm Lobby Capital. In addition, David Hornik, founding partner at Lobby Capital and founder of the Lobby Conferences, will join the EarlyBird Education Board of Directors.
Thirty-nine states now mandate screening for dyslexia. However, finding an appropriate early literacy assessment to screen pre-readers for reading difficulties can be very challenging, and many are not able to screen effectively and provide educators with the data needed to drive instruction. There are a number of factors to consider when evaluating tools for dyslexia and early literacy screening.
EarlyBird Education has been named a winner for the K-12 Newcomer Award in the inaugural Supes’ Choice Awards, the only education industry award judged exclusively by school district superintendents.
