By Ann Schimke | Chalkbeat Colorado
When teacher Cindy Haralson would point at her preschool class with a stuffed owl named Baby Echo, most children quickly repeated the letter, word, and sound they’d just heard her say. Think “B, bat, b.”
But one little girl — a good listener and natural problem-solver — stared blankly at her teacher day after day last year, unable to reproduce what she was hearing and seeing. Haralson recalled the girl looking at her classmates, as if to say, “How do you guys do that? How do you know that?”
The girl’s struggle with alphabet lessons was the kind of red flag that can signal problems learning to read, problems that Haralson believes too often go unaddressed for years.
“It seems like we always wait till kindergarten or first grade, and sometimes second grade,” said Haralson, who teaches in the tiny La Veta School District in southern Colorado. “I think we wait too long to figure these things out.”