“What we know from the research on reading – and what was just confirmed by the national Reading for Understanding Initiative – is that kids need more language. They need more knowledge. And they need foundational mechanical skills to be able to read individual words automatically,” Joan Kelley says.

“The problems that are hardest to address later on are the language and knowledge gaps. Kids need high dosages of rich language, which is a 24/7, 365-days-a-year job for families and educators. But no one tells families what their specific role is or how to get this job done.”

So Kelley came up with an app for that.

An alumna of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Kelley has seen children struggle with reading for years – and so has the rest of the country. As we’ve blogged before, even in Massachusetts, a state known for educational excellence, third grade reading levels have lagged, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We highlighted this in our 2010 report, “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success,” which Kelley contributed to.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made educational gaps worse by forcing districts to close schools and erode children’s learning opportunities. A study published by the American Educational Research Association says that students experienced a “COVID slide,” a more stark version of the “summer slide” learning loss that normally occurs when schools let out in June. The study estimates that because COVID-19 “abbreviated the 2019-2020 school year,” students would lose “roughly 63% to 68% of the learning gains in reading,” so only about two-thirds of what they would have learned if the pandemic had not occurred.

Sadly, many parents have long been unaware of children’s reading performance. Kelley points to the fact that in a survey, the nonprofit organization Learning Heroes found “nine in ten K-8 parents – regardless of race, income, education levels – believe their child performs at or above grade level in reading and math, despite national data that shows barely a third of students perform at grade level.”

To boost children’s reading during the pandemic and beyond it, Kelley is asking two questions: Can we give children more rich language experiences every year, but especially this one? And, Can we engage families in easy and effective ways that make a difference? Her answer to both questions is yes. And the tool she has developed to back up this answer is an app called Abound Parenting.

The app helps parents as well as teachers and out-of-school-time providers have rich, back-and-forth conversations with children by sending the adults daily language prompts. These include academic vocabulary words, to expose children to complex words early, as well as open-ended questions about themes that adults can ask, such as, When the president of the United States arrives somewhere, a band plays Hail to the Chief; if you were president what song would you want played? It’s a prompt that combines vocabulary- and knowledge-building with creative thinking. The app also provides two suggested children’s books per week that build content knowledge of the themes. Abound links to free, read-aloud versions of these books that are online during the pandemic.

An extra benefit of this approach: kids never use screens. They learn instead through face-to-face conversations that they could, in turn, have again with their peers.

“We wanted to create something that doesn’t put a child in front of a screen. We wanted families to have whole body conversations. That’s how kids learn. And we also wanted parents to have a better understanding of what it takes to read well,” Kelley says.

The app is being piloted in five YMCAs across Massachusetts to encourage staff who work with children to do the same kind of language building.

“We wanted to see if we could elevate language during informal moments, like snack time.”

While Kelley won’t have results until after the pilot ends later this month, she has heard positive feedback from YMCA staff members. In a pre-pilot survey, 95 percent said that they believed it was their job to help kids learn to read better, so “the app,” Kelley says, “ends up providing a small dose of professional development each day.”

Helping adults have language-enriching conversations with kids promises to provide tkids with better futures, but there are also economic repercussions, especially because of the pandemic. A report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company says:

“With lower levels of learning and higher numbers of drop-outs, students affected by COVID-19 will probably be less skilled and therefore less productive than students from generations that did not experience a similar gap in learning… By 2040, most of the current K–12 cohort will be in the workforce. We estimate a GDP loss of $173 billion to $271 billion a year—a 0.8 to 1.3 percent hit.”

Kelley’s app can’t, of course, close this massive reading and economic gap. But it is an example of how the country can use small programs like this one as part of a much larger strategy to repair the damage done by the pandemic and to boost reading scores that have lagged for decades.

For Kelley, though, it’s a matter of making a difference right here and now, during stray moments when an adult can talk to a kid about a word like occupy and what happens when you add the suffix pre-; language concepts that will help children read and better understand the world as they grow.

“Learning to read takes a collective and ongoing approach that starts early, and yet we haven’t done enough to seriously engage families. That’s why I’m on a mission,” Kelley says. “I’m not going to stop until parents understand what it takes to read, so they aren’t finding out when it’s too late to support their children. I’m not going to stop until kids have the support they need to become successful readers.”