5 Key Steps to Ensure Your Students Are Kindergarten Ready

Ensuring children are prepared for kindergarten is one of the most important goals in early education. By integrating technology and engaging families, we can close the literacy gap and set young learners on a path to success. Here are five practical early literacy strategies to help boost early literacy skills.

What is the Cost of Educating Our Preschoolers? What is the Cost of NOT Educating Our Preschoolers?

By Holly DeLeon

By Eugene Narciso, COO Footsteps2Brilliance

Meet Beatriz, a multilingual student in San Mateo-Foster City School District (SMFCSD). She and her family immigrated to California from Brazil in February 2023. She enjoys science and loves to sing Itsy Bitsy Spider with her mom. Beatriz started school with limited English language skills. Within only 30 days, she was functioning successfully in her English-only classroom. How?

It Takes a Village: A Successful Collective Impact Model for Early Literacy

There is a literacy gap that exists before children even start kindergarten, and it’s a serious problem for educators. A collective impact model is the solution.

Effective Literacy in Preschool

What should literacy instruction look like in a preschool classroom? As high-stakes testing puts more pressure on teachers and students, the spotlight is shifting to evaluate how we are preparing students in the years before kindergarten. Expectations for our early learners are going up. Many districts are struggling with how to help more children enter kindergarten ready and on a path to academic success. While it may be tempting to transform preschool classrooms to look more like kindergarten, the research shows that there are two literacy strategies that are proven to be developmentally appropriate and massively impactful for future reading success.

Introducing Rapid Readers!

The Rapid Readers series offers high-interest books for transitioning readers to develop reading fluency, background knowledge, vocabulary, and critical thinking. Students listen to a model readers, practice reading independently, and record themselves reading to develop oral language and reading fluency. Additional activities guide students through comprehension strategies and critical thinking. Students complete each book unit with a writing prompt. Best of all, the entire experience can be toggled between English and Spanish to support emergent bilingual students.