What Screening a Kindergartener Actually Looks Like

Most early-grade screeners ask a five-year-old to read the question. That's the problem. If a child is still learning letters, you can't tell whether they got a math question wrong because they can't add — or because they couldn't read the word "more."

Here's what it looks like with the K-2 Screener.

A teacher sits a child down with a tablet and headphones. The app reads every question aloud. The child taps the answer. What comes back is a picture of what that child actually knows — separated from what they can read.

That changes who you can help. A five-year-old who can count to twenty but can't decode a sentence will look like a struggling math student on a paper screener. With audio questions, that same child shows up as strong in numeracy and needing support in literacy — which is the actual truth, and which lets a teacher and a parent do something useful about it.

Same thing in a principal's office trying to figure out, in the first two weeks of school, which kids need intervention now. Same thing for a district trying to get a clean read on kindergarten readiness without burning a month of classroom time.

That's why we built the K-2 Screener. A child's first years of school matter more than any other, and the tools most schools had weren't catching what needed to be caught.