This past year, our teams traced the whereabouts of over 2000 children who participated in the longitudinal study and graduated from kindergarten to elementary school – a formidable task because pre-schools and elementary schools in Israel are entirely separate institutions. Gan-hova (compulsory kindergarten for children aged 5-6) is the final year of the 3-year pre-school system. After kindergarten, children who do not remain in kindergarten for another year graduate to elementary school (1^st-6^th grade), where formal reading instruction begins in 1^st grade.

Our team successfully traced all 1082 Hebrew-speaking children, of whom 71 children were not available to continue in the study for various reasons (retained for another year in kindergarten, moved to another part of the country, parental refusal to continue participating, or children who transferred to schools outside the scope of the present study, including ultra-Orthodox or special education). We began collecting data in January 2020, until the outbreak of COVID-19 and the closure of schools on March 9. At that point, we had data for 798 children (716 with complete data), spread across 92 schools and 167 different homeroom classes. In addition, a self-perception of reading abilities questionnaire was administered to a randomly sampled subset of 200 children.

In the Arabic-speaking sample, 1127 of the 1197 children tested in kindergarten were available for testing in 1st grade (70 were lost owing to retention, relocation, parental refusal, non-compliance, or enrolling in non-mainstream schools). We were able to complete the testing of 855 children, and obtained incomplete data for another 117, by the time of the school closure. These 972 children were distributed across 82 schools (168 classrooms) located in 20 towns and villages in the Arab (Muslim, Christian), Druze, and Bedouin sectors. The following are the measures that were individually administered in 1st grade. All the data have now been coded at the item level.