Kindergarten Readiness: Learn With Homer Helps Even the Youngest Children Prepare for School
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#education–What is kindergarten readiness and why is it so important? According to
the National
Center for Education Statistics, students enter kindergarten at
different skills levels, which is natural given that children come from
a variety of early childhood experiences, ranging from
highly-skilled-focused pre-K programs, play-based preschools, Head
Start, or no preschool at all. An average kindergarten class may have
children with a five-year skill range in terms of reading ability, from
children who don’t recognize letters or letter sounds to those who can
read short books. This makes the kindergarten teacher’s job particularly
challenging.
Learn
With Homer, the #1 Learn-to-Read app,
is offering tips to help parents and students be better prepared for the
start of kindergarten.
While It is important to note that children do not need to be able to
read before entering kindergarten, there are certain skills that make
learning to read easier for a children entering school. One study
(Snow, Burns, and Griffin 1998) on kindergarten readiness reports that
before children can read, write, or calculate, they must acquire
rudimentary skills that serve as stepping stones toward mastery of the
more advanced and complex skills. For reading, these rudimentary skills
include:
-
Becoming familiar with the conventions of print (such as the
English-language convention of reading from left to right and from top
to bottom) - Learning to recognize letters by name
- Associating sounds with letters or letter combinations
- Understanding the meaning of many spoken words and phrases
Learn With Homer was built from the ground up to help children gain
these literacy skills and to motivate children to practice those skills.
By combining the best research on how children learn to read with
state-of-the art game design, the team at Learn with Homer created an
effective learning and motivation tool to prepare children for
kindergarten. The program’s focus on direct phonics instruction, general
knowledge and vocabulary, as well as the vast library of e-books that
cultivate a love of reading make it different from many light-touch
skills apps. Children who are familiar with phonics upon entering
kindergarten tend to advance more easily and quickly than those without.
Here are some additional key kindergarten readiness skills that make
beginning kindergarten easier for children:
- Attentively listens to stories
- Recognizes rhyming words
- Speaks in complete sentences of five to six words
- Makes up stories from images or uses pictures as prompts
- Hears individual sounds in words
- Recognizes and names some letters in the alphabet
- Has an interest in books
- Recognizes some common words like “stop”
-
Understands that words you can say can also be written using letters
from the alphabet - Count to ten
- Recognizes colors
“In the United States alone, two out of three children never learn to
read well, even though a child’s reading level by third grade is the
single biggest predictor of future success, bar none,” noted Stephanie
Dua, CEO and founder of Learn With Homer. “We started Learn With Homer
to give kids everywhere a better future. Our vision is to transform the
academic trajectory of every child who uses our product. We were
inspired to set a new standard and had our product tested by a leading
researcher, the former U.S. assistant secretary of Education. The
results were stunning: kids working alone with Learn With Homer for just
15 minutes a day over six weeks nearly doubled skills most predictive of
later reading proficiency and increased reading abilities by 74 percent.
That’s something we are incredibly proud of and know that any child
entering kindergarten would benefit from this tried and true Homer
Method.”
About Learn With Homer
Learn
With Homer set out to solve a confounding problem: teaching the
world’s children to read. As parents, Learn With Homer co-founders were
trying to teach their own children but were bewildered by the morass of
apps, flashcards, and books on the market, none of which were able to
teach their kids to learn to read from start to finish. Learn With Homer
is a disruptively affordable, simple-to-use, start-to-finish reading
program that children can do on their own. And it’s available to
everyone with a phone in their pocket. To learn more, visit learnwithhomer.com
or download from the iTunes
app store; follow on Facebook,
Twitter,
YouTube
and G+.
Contacts
Learn With Homer
Jenifer Howard, 203-273-4246
jeni@homerapp.com
learnwithhomer.com
