After teaching, founder and CEO Jamie West spent 20+ years building literacy programs with education companies. “One inspiration for Johnnie Max came while collaborating with a language researcher to develop an intervention program for preschoolers. Another came from my dad, Johnnie Max Jones, who spent years traveling and photographing the world,” says Jamie. “When he left his photographs to me, I wanted to use them to impact the learning trajectories of all young children.”
The result is an award-winning platform — a web-based bilingual, early literacy program for Pre-K–K designed to build oral language.
Oral language competence in young children is a strong predictor of later reading and writing success. Yet more than 50% of underserved preschoolers have moderate to severe language delays. These delays can hinder children’s social and academic learning from K–12 into adulthood. Too many children enter school with oral language deficits that prevent later academic achievement. Johnnie Max builds foundational literacy skills with nonfiction content, using an evidence-based framework that accelerates the development of oral language, vocabulary, and critical thinking.
Despite research espousing the benefits of informational text for pre-readers, only 5% of read-alouds in Pre-K are nonfiction. This solution appears to be the only bilingual supplemental online literacy program for Pre-K that offers dialogic reading support with nonfiction.
The team behind the platform are industry leaders in early literacy, early childhood, and social emotional learning. Their device-agnostic platform houses digital media, resources, and lessons based on the science of learning. Annual classroom subscriptions extend to families through a free family portal for equity of access. For these reasons and more, Johnnie Max was named “Best PreK Early Literacy Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
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Original Article Published at Edtech Digest
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