For this episode, I speak to Maya Smart, an early literacy advocate, parent educator and author of Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child. She's affiliated faculty at Marquette University and holds degrees from Harvard and Northwestern. Her website MayaSmart.com features weekly book picks some playful learning ideas and free tools to help parents grow as their children's first teachers.

We get into how she became in reading and why she wanted to research early literacy. We dive into her research, which found disparity in reading achievement between black and white kids. We also spend time discussing her book and how she wrote it. Take notes, it’s a good one!

For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode154.