Ensuring success in school and beyond
Read to Succeed Newsletters
Each month during the school year, The Parent Institute(r) publishes five newsletters, which are available in both English in Spanish:
- Building Readers - Ideas for how you can help children get ready to read. (monthly) Current Issue: English / Spanish
- Helping Children to Learn - Tips you can use to help children to do better in school. (monthly) Current Issue: English / Spanish
- Day-by-Day - Daily activity ideas you can use to help children to better in school. (quarterly) Current Issue: English
- Firm, Fair & Consistent - Ideas to help parents and teachers address issues such as anger, nagging and self esteem. Each topic includes a link to a full-length article that fully addresses the issue. English / Spanish
View Archived Newsletters
Other Read to Succeed Resources
- Cerificate English
- 2007/08 Building Readers Booklist - Recommended books for preschool children. English / Spanish
- Family Fun with Phonics - Explains what phonics is and how parents can incorporate phonics into everyday activities. English / Spanish
The Challenge
According to the latest scientifically-based reading research, young children must practice and master the following emerging literacy skills to be successful in school. Mastery of these skills is a strong indicator of later school success. In 2004, only 44% of children entering Nashville’s public kindergarten had mastered all these skills.
- Oral language (vocabulary)
- Phonological awareness (beginning sounds, rhyming, sound-letter correlations)
- Print awareness (parts of a book, reading left to right, top to bottom, etc.)
- Alphabet knowledge (at least 10 letters of the alphabet prior to kindergarten)
These are skills that the majority of middle- and upper- income families instill in their children through shared reading, regular conversations, and daily activities. However, test results find that children from low-income and impoverished families do not gain these skills prior to school, often because their parents lack a strong educational background. Fewer than 33% of poor children entering Nashville’s public kindergarten classrooms in 2004 had mastered these skills.*
The Solution
The goal of Read to Succeed (RTS) is to ensure that these at-risk children have a solid foundation of the necessary skills when they enter kindergarten. Read to Succeed works with nine area urban child care centers that care for these children everyday and is able to provide:
- Classroom curricula
- Writing and listening centers
- Classroom libraries
- Professional literacy instructors at each center
- 24+ hours annually of professional development to teachers
- Family literacy workshops and lending libraries
The Results
Read to Succeed is already making a difference! 94% of children participating in Read to Succeed scored in the average to high-average range on Get Ready To Read (a representative reading measurement tool), meaning they should be prepared for kindergarten. Of those, 75% achieved “strong skills” in emerging literacy, meaning that they should be reading at or above grade level in the third grade. This is important because after this point children are no longer learning to read; they are reading to learn. By the 4th grade, fewer than 10% of poor readers are ever able to get back on track, explaining, in part, why only 58% of students graduated from Nashville’s public high schools on time in 2004. Reading ability in our society is so critical that some states even use 3rd grade reading scores to determine the number of prison beds they will need in the future.
An investment in our children means a brighter future for all of us. And that’s what matters.
|
"When we come home from school each day, Robbie is so motivated to read a book to me instead of sitting down and watching television. He wants to have several books read to him each night before bed, and we have caught him reading to himself after we tuck him into bed! He is so proud to tell us about Tabby Tiger (a character in a book) and the adventures they have with her at school.”
-- Quote from Erin Hart, mother of Robbie, age 4, whose pre-school offers the Read to Succeed curriculum
|
* Does not include Reading First schools, which are predominantly low-income.
