Students with Reading Deficits Given FREE Access to Audiobooks
Learning Ally, a not-for-profit and leading education solutions organization serving at-risk learners, is responding to the COVID-19 crisis with a relief program to schools across the country. The program includes the Learning Ally Audiobook Solution that helps students with reading deficits, a Distance Learning Resource Site for both educators and parents, and the Square PandaR School to Home Engagement Program for emerging readers. The program offers complimentary access to these proven literacy development solutions effective immediately through August 1st, helping to keep students reading in this crisis and providing a platform that educators nationwide can consider as a component for ensuring distance learning literacy progress, continuity, and equity in the future.
Learning Ally aims to get and keep students reading, engaged, and learning from home as long as school closures continue and through the summer and beyond. Whether they are at-risk PreK-1st graders or students already diagnosed with reading-based learning differences like dyslexia, these students have tremendous educational challenges in traditional school settings and conditions. Now, they are even more at risk of “slipping through the cracks.” Statistics show that for these students, falling behind can have dire consequences. Distance learning puts additional burdens on these students and on the educators and parents that support them.
Learning Ally’s COVID-19 Relief Program aims to assist an additional 500,000 students and 30,000 educators with a suite of solutions and resources that support distance learning:
The Learning Ally Audiobook Solution is the largest library of human-read audiobooks designed for students with reading deficits. Our library includes popular fiction, classics and textbooks - all the books students want and need to read for school and aligned to school curriculum, K-12. The solution’s human-voice to highlighted text enables students to read to their cognitive ability, read independently and become engaged learners.
The Distance Learning Resource Site contains a collection of literacy-based activities and professional learning opportunities, including webinars for educators and content in multiple formats for parents to assist their children while learning from home.
The Square Panda School to Home Engagement Program offers a multi-sensory literacy system for PreK-1 learners at home, designed to build critical foundational literacy skills with adaptive phonics instruction that guides students to work independently at home with very little parent supervision.
Learning Ally solutions are designed for “anywhere access” on personal devices, and are well suited to serve as a distance learning solution, especially under these difficult circumstances.
“Learning Ally solutions have always represented the critical difference between isolation and integration, between frustration and pride, and between struggle and success,” said Andrew Friedman, Learning Ally CEO and President. “We have a key role to play while schools are closed, to ensure at-risk learners, educators and families are supported in their continued efforts around reading, learning and succeeding.”
In the few weeks since Learning Ally made the announcement, there has been an enthusiastic response. Learning Ally staff are mobilized to help schools onboard and have already expanded services to nearly 100,000 students across the country.
For more information please visit www.learningally.org or call 1-800-221-1098
This article originally appeared on the Greater Hartford Patch
