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. UI 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.
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.
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.
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. www.irrc.education.uiowa.edu/spark-early-literacy.
