Fast Start: A Parental Involvement Reading Program for Primary Grade Students.

Fast Start is a program designed to get primary grade children off to a successful start in learning to read through intensive and systematic parental involvement that is coordinated through the school and is based upon proven and effective methods of parent-child interaction around reading. The program is simple to learn, easy to implement, efficient in the amount of time invested by parents, and cost-effective for schools or other educational agencies wishing to implement it. In Fast Start, parents and children read a brief highly predictable and interesting text each day. The reading involves parents reading to children, neurological impress/paired reading, and moves toward children reading on their own. Repeated readings help build fluency, word recognition, and comprehension among children. After the text has been read, parents and children engage in word bank/word sort/sentence building activities using words from the current and previous texts. Preliminary studies of Fast Start have demonstrated that it can have positive effects on primary students' word recognition, fluency, and overall reading proficiency. (Contains 89 references.) (Author/RS)