Tag Archives: seeding reading

Today, young children have access to more technology than ever, and families of almost all socio-economic backgrounds are making smartphones and other Internet-enabled devices part of their daily lives. Many early education programs around the country are beginning to determine how they might harness these tools to engage with parents, improve home-to-school connections, and otherwise augment efforts to help children develop early language and literacy skills. Last week, New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop launched an…

About a month ago, we released a sneak preview of the literacy app analysis that we’re conducting with New America to discover more about the apps that families and educators are using to help children learn to read and communicate. As part of this preview, we provided a quick summary of our approach to this analysis of language- and literacy-focused apps for children ages birth to eight. Today, we are excited to share even more of our findings. In our…

LENA technology is helping researchers and low-income parents better understand how adult-child conversation affects language and literacy. Recent efforts to reduce the “word gap” between affluent and low-income families in Providence, Rhode Island, and Chicago have garnered high-profile headlines and big bucks. Much of the media attention has focused on the technology involved—a tiny recording device and software that help parents and early childhood specialists measure the amounts of talk between parent and child occurring in the home. The system—known…

Can text messages to low-income parents help close the word gap? It’s not an idle question. Last month, the advocacy group Too Small to Fail announced plans to experiment with text messages to parents in a new partnership with Kaiser Permanente, Sesame Workshop,* and Text4Baby. In a recent blog post for Seeding Reading we reported on an initiative called Parent University that sends text messages to Head Start parents with suggestions for building literacy skills in their children. (We also reported on parents’ reactions to the project.)   A study…

When Alexiss Evans enrolled in the Ounce of Prevention Fund’s Parent University literacy program, she did so because she believed in the organization and because she wanted to give her daughter every possible opportunity to learn. “I’m one of those parents who, if [the Ounce says] something, I’ll do it,” she said. “I want to show support and be a team player.” Evans received text messages each weekday for six weeks. These texts suggested activities for Evans to do with her…