Our Story
The tale of Child1st, while not one of Homer's epics, we think it's still pretty cool.
Sarah sees her students struggling with traditional learning methods. Some of her young ones were unable to retain what she taught, in spite of daily repetitions. This led to Sarah’s defining question: “Why do some children struggle in school?”
Sarah was teaching kindergarteners. They had no trouble learning how to spell the sounds they heard in words. However, most did not recognize whole words or remember words they had just decoded minutes before. She studied her students during the day and, at night, she studied education theory in order to find explanations for what she was seeing her students do. When her students would surprise her with what they remembered, she would ask them, “How did you remember that?” This experience led to a possible answer to her question: “If a child is not learning, my teaching style and materials need to change to accommodate them.” Sarah started to experiment with adding right-brain elements to phonics concepts and words.
Sarah’s students started reading confidently using her homemade tools. Spring testing revealed that the reading levels for her kindergarteners began at 2nd grade. The highest reader was reading at a 4th grade level. Over the next few years, Sarah taught in classrooms and worked as a Title 1 Director for grades K-8. Each encounter with a child was a learning moment. When a child struggled, Sarah would try one approach after another until she found one that worked. What resulted was a collection of tried-and-true elements she incorporated into the design of her resources. She designed various materials for teaching sounds & letters, numbers & counting, words & sound spellings, as well as computation. She tested her resources with her students, and the outcomes were astonishing. She concluded that there are certain elements that can be incorporated into the design of resources for teaching anything that will make learning possible for any child, no matter their natural wiring or learning needs.
Alphabet
SnapWords
Math
Child1st is born to share these resources with others. Sarah retired from teaching in the classroom to devote herself full-time to refining the teaching tools she had been using.
New products are developed for reading, writing, math, and more.
Easy-for-Me Teaching
Phonics & Spelling
Spanish
Beyond Sight Words Activities
Castle Quest
Science
SnapWords App
After Sarah's retirement, her son Matthew and daughter Melissa carry on the mission of Child1st, with the support and guidance of Melissa’s husband, James. Together, they remain dedicated to making learning easy and joyful for every child.
Today, we continue to create engaging, multisensory tools for every learner!
