WORDS & PICTURES: Gabrielle Versmessen
The Early Learning Coalition of Manatee County (ELC) has implemented a new assessment tool across six child care centers called EarlyBird. This game-based evaluation assesses literacy and identifies potential reading challenges early before they become reading problems.
Administered on an iPad, EarlyBird is fun and easy to use as it utilizes engaging games to assess and score children’s reading skills. EarlyBird was developed and scientifically validated at Boston Children’s Hospital in partnership with faculty at the Florida Center for Reading Research.
The comprehensive results are given to teachers so that they can target these issues within the classroom and give more individualized help to struggling students. Students take the EarlyBird assessment three times throughout the school year. Once in the beginning, again in the middle of the school year, and a final time at the end of the school year. The assessments take about twenty minutes to complete.
The ELC is given immediate feedback from EarlyBird with resources for grouping and strategies that are shared with the teachers. There are family letters that go home as well to help families with their child’s literacy. Additionally, there are next-step resources that come with the program based on the results the teachers get, and they can utilize them immediately in their lesson plans.
“We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about having this data so early in the year,” said Colleen Perry, Community Educational Initiatives Coordinator for the ELC. “The teachers can group their students based on skill development and know what to start working on within the classroom.”
The assessments cover letter name and sound recognition, rhyming, oral language comprehension like vocabulary, and oral sentence composition. EarlyBird uses voice recognition as opposed to a facilitator to score the students while they play the games. Every student in the VPK programs at the child care centers is assessed. The goal is to see improvement from the first assessment to the last one of the year.
“We are finding the EarlyBird assessments helpful for the ELC’s other programs as well because we’re able to stick different tactics into those programs to help close any gaps,” explained Colleen. “For example, we implement rhyming and vocabulary into our ReadingPals instruction.”
