RESOURCES

We invite you to explore MS CGLR-selected resources that support children’s learning and development. Whether you’re looking to strengthen reading skills, help your child get ready for kindergarten, improve school attendance, or support meaningful summer learning, these curated materials offer practical, family-friendly guidance. You’ll find expert insights, engaging activities, and useful tools to help build a strong foundation for lifelong learning.

The Mississippi Campaign for Grade-Level Reading is excited to welcome communities of all sizes into our growing network! With dedicated support and expert guidance, your community can take meaningful steps toward improving early literacy, attendance, and out-of-school time learning.

Communities interested in joining must complete the following steps:

Submit a Letter of Intent expressing plans to apply
Convene a cross-sector, sponsoring coalition with a designated leader
Develop a Community Solutions Action Plan (CSAP) that will be reviewed

If you are interested in joining the Mississippi Campaign for Gravel-Level Reading, please contact amhobart@olemiss.edu to start a conversation. Support and technical assistance will be provided before, during, and after the application process.

The Mississippi Campaign for Grade-Level Reading welcomes communities of all sizes to join our growing network. With dedicated support and expert guidance, communities can take meaningful steps to strengthen school readiness, improve school attendance, and expand high-quality summer learning opportunities.

Communities interested in joining must complete the following steps:

Submit a Letter of Intent expressing plans to apply
Convene a cross-sector, sponsoring coalition with a designated leader
Develop a Community Solutions Action Plan (CSAP) that will be reviewed

As a parent, you are your child’s first and most important teacher. You know their strengths, challenges, and interests better than anyone. And when parents and educators work together, children thrive!

The Family Guide for Student Success outlines what your child should learn at each grade level and offers ways to reinforce classroom activities at home. These booklets provide clear expectations for what students should know and be able to do by the end of each grade. Meeting these goals will help your child stay on track and succeed in school. This guide will help set clear and consistent expectations for your child, build your child’s knowledge and skills, and help set high goals for your child.

Your involvement makes all the difference! Stay connected with your child’s teacher, and don’t hesitate to ask for extra activities or guidance to support mastery of the standards. If you have questions about the curriculum or school programs, reach out to your child’s school—they’re there to help.

Explore the Family Guide for Student Success by grade:

Mississippi’s vision for family engagement is a multi-generational strategy. Families are the key to a child’s early development and learning. As such, a goal of family engagement must be to support family well-being. Mississippi’s family engagement initiatives and the family engagement practices of educators should promote the safety, health, and financial security of families so they can successfully guide and develop their children. In their separate domains, educators and families both understand the importance of social-emotional skills — that the ability to manage emotions, to empathize, and to collaborate is key to fulfillment and success, in school and in life. However, schools, families, and communities are not always in sync on how to develop those competencies.

In 2017, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) provided a family engagement technical assistance opportunity to coordinate the development of a framework. The framework contains a set of goals and family engagement practices it also identifies the state’s family engagement initiatives to push the work out to education communities. Mississippi’s Family Engagement Framework, while informed by research and federal resources, utilizes the overall structure of the Parent, Family and Community Engagement Framework published by the Office of Head Start. It is important to note the strategies are not additional program requirements but rather guidelines for high-quality practices.

Mississippi’s Family Engagement Coalition has identified innovative strategies to support families as well as opportunities for family members to develop their skills, learn about child development, and become more socially and financially self-sufficient.

VIEW MS FAMILY ENGAGEMENT FRAMEWORK

The MS Family Engagement Toolkit directly aligns with the four goals of the Mississippi Family Engagement Framework. The members of the family engagement coalition and data from focus groups identified strategies and activities to support sustainable family engagement efforts in learning communities. While these strategies and activities are not comprehensive, it provides a solid foundation and starting point from which to further strengthen family engagement efforts. Please feel free to modify or adjust any of the activities to meet the needs of families in your learning community.

VIEW MS FAMILY ENGAGEMENT TOOLKIT

If you are eager to help your child with reading at home, here are a few resources to support your efforts. Reading to your child is an important task that will greatly contribute to his/her academic success. And it should be fun for you both!

Strategies / Activities:

Here are a few strategies to try when you read (and even better, these support the Mississippi Dept. of Education’s English/Language Arts Standards)

Kindergarten Strategies / Activities –

ask questions about key details of story and have your child “be the teacher” and ask YOU questions about the story
encourage your children to retell the story (flip through the book page by page if needed to help “guide” their re-tell)
work with your child to identify characters, places, important things, or major events in the story
ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text
describe the relationship between illustrations and the story (tell what is happening based on the pictures)
compare and contrast characters and their adventures/experiences in familiar stories
while reading to your child, have them follow words in story as you read left to right, top to bottom (you can use your finger to point for practice)
work with your child to help them recognize all upper and lowercase letters in the alphabet (you can even play a matching game with the upper and lower case letters written on cards)
help your child recognize and produce rhyming words (if there’s a ring in the story, see if they can come up with other words that rhyme with ring – thing, sing, wing)
isolate initial, medial, final sounds in CVC words – like C – A – T, make each sound and then blend them together. Try it with dog, hop, pig. See if there are any CVC words in the story you read!
work with words by adding or substituting a sound in words to make new words (for example, cat – change the “c” to “b” and you now have bat. Change the “b” to “s” and you now have sat.)
practice high frequency sight words – the, she, my, is, are, do, does; you can write these on flashcards or have students “hunt and seek” for these words in the story and say them
use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.
encourage your child to participate in collaborative conversations – back and forth, by answering and asking questions.
describe familiar people, places, things, and events and, with prompting and support, provide additional detail.
form regular plural nouns orally by adding /s/ or /es/ – try doing so with words from the story (e.g., dog, dogs; wish, wishes).
understand and use question words (interrogatives) (e.g., who, what, where, when, why, how).
identify real-life connections between words from a story and their use (e.g., note places at home that are cozy; safety tips around the house).

First Grade Strategies / Activities –

Ask questions about key details of story and have your child “be the teacher” and ask YOU questions about the story.
Encourage your children to retell the story (flip through the book page by page if needed to help “guide” their re-tell).
Describe characters, settings, major events in a story.
Identify who is telling the story at various points in a text.
Compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in stories.
Ask and answer questions to determine or clarify the meaning of words/phrases in a text.
Distinguish long from short vowel sounds in spoken single-syllable words – example “sheep” (long e) and “egg” (short e).
Decode two-syllable words following basic patterns by breaking the words into syllables. Here’s a helpful resource for supporting your child with this skill!
Write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure.
Participate in collaborative discussions – back and forth
Build on others’ talk in conversations by responding to the comments of others through multiple exchanges
Use verbs to convey a sense of past, present, and future (e.g., Yesterday I walked home; Today I walk home; Tomorrow I will walk home).
Produce and expand complete simple and compound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences in response to prompts.
Identify frequently occurring root words (e.g., look) and their inflectional forms (e.g., looks, looked, looking).
understand and use question words (interrogatives) (e.g., who, what, where, when, why, how).
identify real-life connections between words from a story and their use (e.g., note places at home that are cozy; safety tips around the house).

Explore even more resources at HomeReadingHelper.org.

During time outside of school it is crucial for children to have access to healthy meals, safe learning spaces, and enriching books and educational opportunities—ensuring they continue learning even when school is out.

The Mississippi Campaign for Grade-Level Reading is committed to helping parents and caregivers keep kids learning during time out of school! Check out these free, easy-to-use resources to support your child’s growth and learning.

Reach Every Reader

The Harvard Graduate School of Education partnered with MIT’s Integrated Learning Initiative and the Florida Center for Reading Research to launch Reach Every Reader in 2018 with the goal of making significant progress on the crisis in early literacy. As part of the Reach Every Reader initiative, the Harvard Graduate School of Education developed three new FREE apps to promote pre-literacy skills through dialogue and playful interactions between children and caregivers. These apps encourage conversations and help children build pre-literacy skills.

Animal Antics: Create a story by taking turns making animals say funny things as they visit a store, a library, a construction site, and more!
Photo Play: Use dozens of stickers, talk balloons, and emojis to decorate and discuss all your favorite family photos!
Small Wonders: Big ideas to get families talking!

Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Kids Club

Mississippi Public Broadcasting Classroom TV

Mississippi Department of Education’s Summer Food Service Program

Reading Rockets Summer Reading Tips for Parents