Engaging Preschool Families With ReadyRosie

Challenge

The Nebraska Children and Families Foundation secured a grant from the Buffet Early Childhood Fund to help strengthen the partnership between early childhood programs and the families they serve. Their mission included the following objectives.

Solution

The Fund found the perfect fit with ReadyRosie.

When the pandemic hit and widespread school and childcare closures began, ensuring families leveraged the tools in ReadyRosie effectively to create meaningful home learning environments became a mission-critical imperative. That’s when the ReadyRosie Partner Success team built on the existing partnership with the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation to develop a strategy to address the new challenges that educators and families in Nebraska were facing.

Results

Meeting the unique demands of disrupted classroom learning

With the Partner Success Team’s support, the families, teachers, and programs in Nebraska successfully adopted ReadyRosie. The Buffet Early Childhood Fund required a formal program evaluation, which was conducted by the University of Nebraska Medical Center. They evaluated how school districts and childcare providers across the state utilized ReadyRosie to encourage family engagement and maintain connections with children and their families during the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. They released their findings in the ReadyRosie Program Evaluation: 2020 COVID Report. 

• Parent enrollment in ReadyRosie grew steadily throughout the spring of 2020 as a result of the pandemic’s impact in Nebraska.
• In-home prevention services that moved to a virtual format significantly increased their ReadyRosie use, which bolstered their services.
• Program/teacher/staff adoption and usage all increased—the lack of face-to-face contact resulted in teachers, who were previously unfamiliar with ReadyRosie, leveraging the tool to stay connected with children and families.
• Resources around routines and social–emotional skills were frequently requested—this content was extremely valuable to families during this period of disrupted schedules.
• Family expectations and engagement remained a struggle with the additional pressures and responsibilities put on families and programs during COVID-19.

Using video modeling to support all families

The ReadyRosie Active Family Engagement System is built on the premise that “every child can be ready to learn when school and families work together.”

ReadyRosie uses video modeling to build school family partnerships to promote school readiness. A weekly video playlist is sent to families via text or email, and families and educators can also access the 1000+ videos through the ReadyRosie video library, which contains videos in English and Spanish for topics on health and well-being, language and literacy, math and reasoning, and social–emotional development for children from birth to age 8.

Sites reported that, although usage was not consistent from household, families who used the videos used them consistently. Some sites reported that their families appreciated the extra ideas and activities that ReadyRosie videos showed them how to do with their children and were excited to put them to use. “Parents would watch it and then be like hey, we’re going to do this the rest of the day.”

While the world changed drastically between the moment Nebraska selected ReadyRosie as their family engagement tool and its full implementation, ReadyRosie offered critical support to early childhood programs and the children, families, and communities they served.