Written by Rob Bayuk in partnership with Megan Dowdle, Kindergarten Teacher at Glenmar Elementary, and Natalie Eder, Kindergarten Teacher at Halstead Academy
Part Two of a Two-Part Series
Part One of this series was a story about access, and what grew from it. Over several years, Baltimore County Public Schools turned two-way, multilingual communication into something more than administrative messaging — it became a source of connection, and ultimately trust. That foundation enabled a shift families and educators both want: working together to support student growth.
Megan Dowdle teaches kindergarten at Glenmar Elementary, a smaller, Title I community school in a coastal-suburban part of Baltimore County. Natalie Eder teaches kindergarten at Halstead Academy, also a Title I school, in Hillendale, a densely populated neighborhood sitting right on the line between Baltimore County and Baltimore City where she is in her fifteenth year. The two schools are just 12 miles apart, but serve different communities with different needs, a reminder that even within one district, no two schools look alike.
For both teachers, though, the relationship with families was already there, built through check-ins on attendance and conversations about the classroom, which had made the line between school and home a trusted one. That trust is what made the next step possible: the move from keeping families informed to encouraging them to support what was happening in the classroom.
It’s a small-sounding shift with a real premise behind it: a child spends far more waking time outside the classroom than in it, and a teacher who already has a parent’s trust has a way to reach that time. Because families had come to rely on the messages, a new kind of message — a few minutes of reading, a letter sound to practice, a decodable book with instructions in the families home language — didn’t arrive as an assignment. It arrived as an extension of a relationship that already existed. This is what that looks like inside two classrooms.
The Same Channel, a New Job
That shift worked because the hardest part was already behind them. Introducing anything new to a classroom is hard. It takes effort to get teachers on board and busy families to engage. At Baltimore County, that part was done, which made the decision to add literacy support that much easier: the connection was already there.
In January 2026, as part of a pilot across ten elementary schools, kindergarten through grade 2, teachers began sending curriculum-aligned literacy activities home through TalkingPoints Academics at Home, encouraging families to try them while making dinner or walking to school. And because they arrived through the same TalkingPoints channel families already used, the delivery felt familiar even when the content was new.
Megan was already using TalkingPoints several times a week: Wednesday theme-day reminders, Thursday folder notes, and check-ins with families. She remembers what the alternative was. Paper communication, she said, was challenging and slow, and she rarely heard back. Now she does. Megan’s own room reflects the district’s diversity, with students arriving each year speaking different home languages and at different levels of English proficiency.
Natalie has leaned on TalkingPoints since the district adopted it a couple of years ago at Halsted Academy, a Title I community school where most students walk to class, and the population grows more linguistically diverse every year. TalkingPoints has been her primary line to Spanish-speaking families, and it’s still a key part of her classroom routines today. On the day we spoke, she had messaged four families about absent students and heard back from all four before the first bell.
So when TalkingPoints Academics at Home arrived, it didn’t ask families to download anything, learn anything, or check anywhere new. It showed up where they were already paying attention.
Easy Enough to Actually Happen
The activities themselves are deliberately small. Each one is short enough to fit the moments families already have, whether a few minutes over dinner, or a quick exercise at a stoplight. It arrives in the family’s home language, aligned to what the class is already learning, and it asks nothing extra of anyone: no special materials or background knowledge for the family, nothing to print or prep for the teacher. Design like that only matters, though, if it works and it’s getting used at home. In two kindergarten classrooms, it did.
Both teachers reached for the same word, unprompted: easy. Megan shared how selecting and sending a weekly activity was “very easy,” just a couple of minutes, almost no lift on her end. And Natalie heard a similar sentiment from her families: the activities were simple enough to fold into a car ride or bath time, which is exactly where many of them happened. No printer, no quiet hour, no homework guilt.
What Families Are Doing With It
In a pilot, particularly one in these early grades, the clearest signal isn’t a test score. It’s whether families and students engage with it in a positive way. In Megan’s classroom, they did — so much so that families started asking for more.
“I polled my families to see what they thought, and a lot of them said they wanted more. A few even asked when math was coming.” — Megan Dowdle, Kindergarten Teacher, Glenmar Elementary
Natalie heard it too. One kindergarten parent, Shamonica McCoy, shared: “We really like the reading activities you send through TalkingPoints. I think they make it easier to sound out words and I noticed a big improvement with his reading since you started sending them. When we read regular books at home, he can read different words throughout the book that are simple enough but with the ones you send, he can pretty much read the whole thing himself.”
For another parent, the decodable books did something unexpected — they became a small library at home.
“The decodable books were a great help — a short read, but impactful. We don’t have to make as many library trips now; it’s like having a little library at home.” — Mavis Adebisi, kindergarten parent, Halstead Academy
And the activities slipped into the moments families already had:
“They are a great way to work with my child at home while we are either making dinner, taking a bath, in the car.” — Tiera Stepney, kindergarten parent, Halstead Academy
One story stayed with Natalie. A student receiving speech services has been making progress this year, and the parent credits the home activities, at least in part, for helping it along. It’s a single child, and Natalie is careful not to overstate it, but it’s the kind of moment that tells a teacher the work is reaching the place that matters most.
Early Signals
Two classrooms are an anecdote, not a trend, and Baltimore County approached this pilot the same careful way it approached its earlier work with TalkingPoints.
In the first sixty days, about twenty-six teachers and more than five hundred families had been reached. A majority of families accessed at least one activity; engagement percentages in the strongest single classroom ran into the nineties; and in the first family poll, roughly nine in ten said to keep the activities coming, with about half asking for more. Megan’s own class, she noted, exceeded expectations academically this year — she is careful not to hang that on any one tool, but the engagement was real, and her families kept asking for the next activity.
For Natalie, what landed hardest wasn’t a pilot stat at all. “When I found out how much of what kids learn actually happens at home — not in my classroom — it kind of blew my mind. It changed how I think about everything I send home.”
The most useful feedback in an early pilot tends to surface right alongside that kind of demand. After weeks of sending each activity by hand, Natalie’s clearest ask was a practical one: let teachers batch and schedule literacy activities, so a busy week never means missing something families are coming to expect. It’s a small request with a real point behind it — consistency is what makes the activities land — and it’s exactly the kind of early learning a pilot like this is built to capture. Working in real classrooms, with teachers like Natalie, is how Academics at Home was shaped ahead of its wider rollout to schools and districts for the 2026-27 school year.
What Comes Next: Extending the Bridge
Laura Schreiber, the ELD Specialist at Baltimore County Public Schools who helped design the instructional alignment behind the pilot, has a phrase for this whole effort: “We talk about that bridge — TalkingPoints is used as a bridge. We need to bridge what’s happening at school and what’s happening at home.”
That bridge is getting wider. For the 2026-27 school year, Baltimore County is expanding TalkingPoints Academics at Home from ten schools to all of its elementary schools and extending the grade band from K-2 into PreK-3 – a direction that lines up with Maryland’s renewed emphasis on early reading proficiency.
The teachers were already pulling in that direction on their own. Natalie planned to recruit her grade-level teammates so the next group of kindergartners gets a coordinated approach from the first week of school. Both teachers also want math in the rotation. Families are asking for more. The demand, in other words, is running slightly ahead of the product implementation, which is the position any new resource hopes to be in.
The learning from Baltimore County’s experience is a simple one. The district didn’t start by introducing a new literacy product or supplemental curriculum – it started by building a genuine connection with families, and then looked for ways to grow it. What grew from that connection is the goal every school, family, and teacher actually shares: new, creative ways to help all students grow.
Sometimes that growth starts with something small, like a fun activity spotting sounds or letters on the walk to school, or a passing moment with your child at the park. It’s in those little, recurring moments that families and teachers start to see it: a child sounding out a word with a bit less help, reaching for the next book. More of those moments, for more students, is the whole point.
Read Part One in this series to hear from BCPS leaders Angela Dregier and Laura Schreiber about how the district reached families from 122 countries, and how earlier, more balanced two-way communication helped cut chronic absenteeism from 20.8% to 16.0%.
Ready to bring learning home in your district?
When Baltimore County families started asking “what more can we do?”, the channel was already open. TalkingPoints Academics at Home gives PreK-3 families weekly, curriculum-aligned literacy and math activities by text, translated into their home language, with no apps, logins, or prep required for teachers.
