Welcome to Abound Parenting– thanks for joining us! Let’s begin with the Abound Check-In!
With Abound, you can help set your child up for reading success, from age 3 to grade 3. We’ll help you understand which skills your child needs, and build your child’s skills through sweet and eye-opening daily conversations.
The Abound approach: You don’t need to teach your child to read. We created Abound so that parents can do the fun and informal building of skills at home, and let teachers focus on the systematic skill-building at school.
Here’s a quick overview of how Abound Check-In works:
When you open the Abound app, you’ll land on the TalkOn page. This is the first daily question, based on the current theme. Start a back-and-forth conversation by asking the question and listening to your child’s response. Remember, children learn when you personally connect while you’re talking back and forth. Show you’re interested in what your child has to say. Talk WITH your child, not to him/her. It should not feel like homework!
Next you can go to the WordUp page and begin a conversation about this week’s word. When kids are excited to learn about words, and are more aware of words and curious about them, they are more likely to be strong readers, too.
Then, you can check out the recommended book on the BookOut feature. To build up your child’s knowledge and expose him or her to more academic language, get the books at the library (next week’s books are listed here, too) and read them together. Click on the book icon to get book ideas to talk about, but most of all, make it a cozy and experience that will bring joy to both of you 🙂 THAT should always be the focus around reading at home.
Finally, take the time to answer the benchmark Check-In questions, which you’ll find on our menu. This will help you understand which skills your child should be working on, and helps us know which questions to send your way daily.
- You might not know the “answers” to some of these questions, but that’s fine! The Check-In was designed to help you learn more about how reading development happens over time, and also get a feel for what you can do casually at home and what the teacher is working on at school. This will all make you a more informed parent, which means there is less of a chance that your child could fall through the cracks through the years.
- After finishing the Check-In, you’ll get your child’s Abound Results, explaining what your answers tell us about how your child is doing in the three different skill areas important for reading. Remember, the questions relate to the skills your child will be working on now, not skills that your child already needs to know!
- If you have any questions or concerns and your child isn’t yet in school, share the Check-in Results with pediatricians or caregivers.
- If your child is in school, we suggest you share your Check-In Results with your child’s teacher a week before the conference. Then, during the conference, you’ll have a chance to discuss what you see happening at home, and the teacher can tell you what he or she sees happening at school. Parents and teachers need to work together to create strong readers, and Abound gives you the data to do just that.
- Eight weeks after you first answered the Check-In questions, you’ll be prompted to answer the questions again. Depending on your child’s age, the questions might be new or may be the same ones you saw earlier.
- NOTE: This is just a sampling of questions to give you a basic idea of the kinds of things that your child should be working on at this particular age. (For more comprehensive analysis, a child would need to have screening assessments administered by a professional.) We hope you use your Check-In Results to inspire everyday skill-building in easy and fun ways, or to have a conversation with a clinician or teacher.
So get started! We look forward to accompanying you and your child(ren) on the road to reading 🙂 Please reach out with any questions — info@aboundparenting.com.