The Get Ready to Read! online videos (in English and Spanish) introduce parents to the free, online early literacy screening tool, provide easy-to-follow instructions and include helpful resources and fun skill-building activities.

Planning to travel with the family this holiday season?  Try making the trip a learning experience for the whole gang by looking online for interesting facts about your destination or even your own holiday traditions. Check out Reading Rockets for more tips to turn holiday vacations into an adventure for the whole family!

New Year's Resoution #1:
Read with your child every day!

Why not start the new year with a resolution to read to your child every night before bed?! 

Instead of just reading the story, try expanding on your child's responses and encouraging them to retell the story.  Be sure to reiterate names, objects and events in the book while you're reading.  This is called "dialogic reading," and the few extra minutes you take practicing this kind of reading with your child can help them build the basic language and literacy skills they need to become successful readers. 

If you are already reading to your child, commit to an extra ten minutes a day.  For more information about dialogic reading, watch these informative videos on LD.org.

Happy New Year!

The Transitioning to Kindergarten Toolkit includes great information for helping your child get ready to start kindergarten.

This "Numbers and Counting" excerpt from the toolkit offers parents important learning milestones as well as several skill-building activities to help incorporate numbers and counting into everyday activities!

Get ready for numbers and counting today!

Download and read "What would Recognition & Response (R&R) look like in a typical early childhood classroom?" from the Recognition and Response website.  

This vignette offers an example of how a classroom teacher might use R&R to determine whether most children in her class were making adequate progress in key domains of learning and development, and respond to individual children who require additional supports to learn.

 Try creating Family Literacy Bags — a collection of books and related activities surrounding classroom studies and topics for parents and students to read together at home. 

What do you need to know and do to help preschoolers learn about math? In "Preschool Math Grows Up: Tips for Teachers" you'll find tips to help you establish baseline skills and measure improvement for individual students.

"Understanding Numbers and Counting Skills in Preschoolers" will help you understand what math awareness and skills your child should be developing by age three or four.

This article provides a list of milestones and notes how your child is doing in each area and offers several ways for you and your child to play with numbers and counting throughout the day.

Secretary Arne Duncan recently spoke at the National Association for the Education of Young Children Annual Conference. Duncan spoke of two primary challenges facing early learning advocates, HHS and the Department of Education: "a coordinated system of early care and education for young children that builds better transitions for children from birth through third grade..." and "to accelerate the shift from judging quality based solely on inputs to judging quality based chiefly on achieving the best outcomes of children's development and school readiness."

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