(Radio Iowa) – The University of Iowa’s Reading Research Center is launching a free online resource to help parents of young children stay engaged in learning over the summer. U-I Professor Leah Zimmermann, the center’s assistant director, says the Spark Early Literacy Hub is designed to help families grow a child’s reading skills as part of their everyday routines.
Zimmermann says, “It includes a downloadable booklet called ’10 Activities to Spark Early Literacy’ that provide instructions and materials for fun, interactive activities that parents can do with their kids to support two critical word recognition skills.” Those skills are the ability to recognize the sounds in spoken language and the ability to see a letter and connect it to a specific sound. “For example, for the letter G, we have a G that kind of looks like a goat, which helps students learn the concept, that the most frequent sound for the letter G is ‘guh’ as in goat,” Zimmermann says.
“So they click on the letter and a video plays that demonstrates the most common sound for the letter and shows a close-up of a person’s mouth pronouncing that sound.” There are videos of Iowa parents modeling how to do the activities with their kids, interactive tools and printable activities, as well as a free app for sounding out letters.
“There are tons of other resources on the Spark Early Literacy Hub. We have coloring pages. We have downloadable versions of the embedded picture mnemonic cards that parents can use to do some of those activities with their children,” Zimmermann says, “and we also have a really fun and simple memory match game to help parents practice letter sounds with their children.”
One aim of the hub is to counteract the “summer slide,” where children may not have as many opportunities to learn and practice the literacy skills they use throughout the school year. The state of Iowa ranks 9th in the nation for literacy, with a rate of 92-point-5 percent.
https://irrc.education.uiowa.edu/spark-early-literacy
