Early reading research opportunity
An invitation to participate in Play Roly research
Are you a parent with a young child (not yet sounding out words to read) planning to complete Play Roly? Would you like to participate in our research project? We are inviting participants to our second pilot study to assess Play Roly’s effectiveness in developing phonological awareness and other early reading skills, age-appropriately, with play.
The project is based on parent-filmed videos of them and their 3 to 6-year-old child singing along at home to the 26 videos in the Play Roly program. It’s exciting to play along at home and see the excitement on your child’s face when he/she understands Roly’s language for the first time.
The participant videos will only be used for the purposes of research unless participants elect to provide written consent in a separate form.
The project is being led by our board member Dr. Linda Siegel, a globally renowned scholar in reading and learning research.
What do participants have to do?
Play Roly is now inviting participants to our 2023 research project. Participants are asked to complete the full Play Roly program, which consists of 26 instructional videos of 1 – 2 minutes in length.
The first module’s 6 videos are repeated until the child easily understands Roly (can blend Roly’s three letter sounds into a word i.e., ss-uh-nn into sun). This takes from 1 to 12+ videos.
Next, participants complete modules 2 – 6 (20 videos).
The program’s total time ranges from about 1 to 1.5 hours. Each day (doesn’t have to be every day if this isn’t possible), parents upload on WhatsApp the video of their child rolling their Roly-ball and singing along with them to a different Play Roly video, starting with Play Roly 1.
After you complete the program, for your last video, we ask you to snuggle up with your child and encourage them to read our book “Fun in Sand” to you. Please don’t read it with them beforehand. You can help them by sounding-out words or remembering the letter sounds if needed.
To participate, please contact us
Before you get started, we’ll ask you to sign a consent form. Email us at roly@playroly.com to let us know you are interested, and we’ll get you started within a day or so. Throughout the research project, parents are invited to submit questions, feedback, or comments.
We hope you’ll join our 2023 research project. It’s fun, free, and you’ll be helping us improve Play Roly to make it easy for all kids to start to read.
