It Takes a Village
What can you do to ensure your child gets off to the right start?
You read to your preschool child every day. You fill your home with books. You encourage and inspire. You're doing everything right. Yet, your child still may struggle to learn to read.
Why?
In this three-book series written for parents of preschoolers, reading specialist and award-winning author, Faith Borkowsky, and graphic artist, Sheryl Lynn Rosenstock Marcus, introduce a committed group of community professionals who provide a concerned parent with practical advice, specific recommendations, and their perspectives on language, literacy, and dyslexia in the critical years of development, birth to five, and in later early childhood grades.
What’s different about each book is the perspective and important information that each community-based professional - a pediatrician, a preschool teacher, and a librarian – can provide to parents of young children and struggling readers. Parents of babies and toddlers frequently look to such professionals for guidance on literacy development, and the book series is intended to be a roadmap for both the professionals and the parents. The information imparted is meant to be cumulative.
Parents need to be aware of the link between speech and language development and learning to read.
Pediatricians can and should start the conversation with parents before the start of school.
Preschool teachers should know how to develop the necessary pre-literacy skills for reading success.
Librarians, who traditionally have not advised parents about dyslexia, are natural resources for parents and should be knowledgeable about explicit instruction in systematic phonics, intervention, and appropriate children’s books.
Parents need to educate themselves before their children enter school.
Why now?
The schools are teaching reading backwards. Look no further at the number of children in need of intervention. Instead of a prevention model, we wait for children to fail and hope that remediation will work. Parents need to have this information early in order to advocate for their children immediately.
The only parents who know about language, literacy, and dyslexia are the ones who have suffered alongside their older children. Many of them become proactive and respond preemptively by watching for red flags and even teaching their younger children to read as a way to “school-proof” them.
Parents today do not have the time to sit down and read lengthy books on important topics. They want concise, straightforward advice. The “If Only I Would Have Known…” series is written for busy parents and professionals. Watch it in action in a book study group.
