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Teaching Kids to Read at Home:What Every Parent Should Know & Do

  

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How can we create a cultural shift where home is the epicenter of learning, healing, and connection? 

Equip parents with the tools to embody a trauma informed, emotionally responsive, culturally relevant home culture that's grounded in science, supports literacy instruction, and of course...shows up with that bell hooks kind of love.  


It's a tall order but, it can be done. 
In fact, at Raising Readers we are doing it ... in real time!
  

Ultimately, this work is bigger than schools, parents, or reading. 
 in defense of childhood and our divine assignment to center humanity and belonging.

nikolai's bio 

For over 15 years I have worked to empower parents, with special attention to marginalized communities, with science-based frameworks of early brain development, literacy instruction, non-violent discipline, and self-directed education. Here are some highlights: 

  • My book, Ring the Alarm, has been used in public schools, private consultants, Brooklyn Kindergarten Society, and the Department of Health to name a few.
  • Facilitated workshops in over 400 preschools, private early childhood centers, Early Start and Head Start centers, schools, and organizations. 
  • Helped over 2,000 parents transform their home culture and children's literacy instruction at home through my cohorts, virtual workshops, and self directed courses. 
  • Developed an early literacy system, The Foundation Bag and corresponding framework, The Cheatcode by Raising Readers, for toddlers and preschoolers, which leverages both the science of reading and the science of play in 2019.
  • Developed a schooled age series, Reading is for Everybody! and corresponding framework Connect, Decode, Stack for Impact™ which leverages both the science of reading and the science of caregiver attachment and environment in order to optimize reading for meaning, executive function, and overall well-being
  • Client and collaboration list includes private, public, and charter schools as well as Bankstreet College, Anahasa Consulting, Rooted in Reflection, and Reconstruction, Inc., and NYC Department of Education (FACE) Office of Family and Community Engagement 
  • Created a Facebook group for BIPOC families and co-conspirators committed to Black and Brown liberation with now over 3,000 members.
  • Brag Bag: Certified Forest School Director and host of a nature based mixed age community learning co-op, Liberatorium. 


Schools should teach children to read. It is a reasonable expectation. 

But reading is not a school skill.  It is a life skill and every child deserves to be raised by caregivers and community that can teach and support their personhood with knowledge transfer, education, and belonging.  Equipping parents with the skills to support their children's access to literacy is not just ideal for school purposes; it is human right and medicine for the central nervous system. 
We are not just teaching children to read.

We are raising readers. 

-K.Quire mom of 2

I wasn’t born a parent, and the moment she was born I didn’t intuitively become a great, or even good, one. It takes work. It takes learning your children, it takes learning how to learn them and how to interpret what they can’t tell you. It takes unlearning all you have learned about parenting, stripping it down, taking what is valuable and discarding what is not. Nikolai has helped me do this. I have taken Continuing Legal Educational classes for 17 years. CLEs strengthen my legal acumen, make me a better advocate, and attorney for my clients. Parenting classes strengthen my parenting skills, and make me a better parent to my children. Let’s dispel the myth in our community that parenting classes in conjunction with ineptitude, an abuse case, a divorce, or a custody matter. We can learn to break our generational courses, learn to parent a “difficult child”, and break our own bad thoughts and guilt around parenting. Parenting education is self work. Parenting education is often times shadow work. I am thankful for our cohort and Nikolai for providing space for BIPOC parents (that includes you too daddies and BABA’s) to learn and explore deeply how to better parent our children. I thank you for your guidance on this journey. I am learning and listening with empathy, daily. She holds classes weekly in the evenings, if you have a child between 0 and 18 and are interested in being a better version of your parenting self, I strongly recommend you hit her up and come school with us.

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