Dad and Mom, the buck stops with you! When all is said and done, you are the reason your child can or cannot read. The research is clear, the work is clear, the solution is clear. All your child needs, is for you to be clear, that your early prevention is worth a lifetime of other’s intervention.
When you look at our education system today, no one really cares that your child can’t read. Now let me place a disclaimer on that statement. When your child comes into the school system in Pre-K not reading, they are already behind and may never catch up. Classrooms are packed with 25 to 30 children and one teacher just out of college and scared crazy. There are 10 children in the room ready to read and 15 struggling with site words. There’s a couple in there with behavior issues and causing the whole class to almost come to a stop. This one young teacher (0 to 5 years’ experience) is sweating raindrops trying to just get the classroom under control. Not a lot of time or concern for this young teacher to teach reading.
However, if every parent bringing these wonderful children into being would do their work at home early and intentionally every day; every child could come into Pre-K and beyond ready to read. I just believe that every teacher wants to help every child learn to read. I also believe that every parent wants the best for their child, but many just don’t have the skills needed to make that happen. So then, who cares about our children not reading, “We all do.”
So what’s the solution to this crisis? We need all the (Adults) to stop blaming and blowing smoke about this issue and whose fault it is and start training parents and teachers together, how to use the same solutions proven to work. The educational team is not just the teachers and administrators in our schools, but parents too. There is a system in the corporate world called “Step-wise Refinement.”
When I defined Step-wise Refinement for the purpose of child-readers to become independent readers, it would sound like this:
To develop every child’s early reading skills, we must first engage parents around proven researched-based early literacy solutions that work. Making sure that every parent and every teacher are trained together, to understand every function of the solution and we keep refining their implementation of the solution until the entire series of steps are completed, leading to the verifiable independent reading of every child.
The results of every child would then be, College Bound, Corporate Found, and Community Sound.
