Welcome to Nido! 

The word itself contains a set of meanings that are unfolding for us and, we hope, for you. The word “nido means “nest” in Italian, but the concept of a “nest for learning” came to us as a result of a trip to the extraordinary school, Reggio Emilia, in Italy. There we saw how young children can learn in multiple ways and how teachers and families can facilitate this learning in different ways. We hope to incorporate elements of their philosophy and build a nest of learning experiences that will help children of all ages learn to read and develop their full potential as human beings.

We will begin the resources in Nido with RAVE-O, an approach to early reading intervention that has been proven over and over again through the most rigorous research to help many struggling readers. This intervention is based on the beauty and complexity of all the processes in the reading brain and is described in another section in detail.

But that is but the beginning of our nest.  Soon we will offer a new hybrid version of RAVE-O that incorporates all that we learned from the research about the importance and advantages  of print for young learners (see Wolf, 2018; Baron, 2022), as well as what we have learned about the best uses of digital games for practice and automaticity. There will be new stories, called Minute Stories, that expand our continuous emphases on perspective-taking, inference, cultural responsiveness, and the sheer joy of reading.  A little later we will be adding a whole new extended RAVE-O for slightly older readers. It continues and strengthens the connections among words and stories of classic RAVE-O by building up more advanced decoding skills and more sophisticated reading and language processes through emphases on what we call the “deep reading” abilities---- like empathy, critical thinking, and personal insights.

Over time there will be ever evolving resources, some digital, some print, that stem from our collective research and from the needs you tell us that would help your work on our shared goals: the next generation of deep readers, deep thinkers, and deeply creative, empathic citizens. We welcome you today and look forward to a future with you as co-contributors. There will even be ways some of you can contribute directly to our work to make reading a basic human right.

References:

Baron, N. (2022). How We Read Now.  New York: Oxford Press.

Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York: Harper & Collins.