Today’s Literacy Headlines

Michael missed most of first grade, the foundational year for learning to read. It was the first fall of the pandemic, and for months Atlanta only offered school online. Michael’s mom had just had a baby, and there was no quiet place to study in their small apartment. He missed a good part of second grade, too. So, like most of his classmates at his Atlanta school, he isn’t reading at the level expected for a third grader. And that poses an urgent problem. Third grade is the last chance for Michael’s class to master reading with help from teachers before they face more rigorous expectations.

During Autism Acceptance Month, transit systems in New York and other major cities are giving children with autism — many of whom are fascinated by trains — the opportunity to record the station announcements that riders hear.

STEM-based education is important for all learners, providing rich opportunities for developing 21st-century skills; it is focused on hands-on learning with real-world applications through a cross-curricular lens, meaning that students learn science and math while also developing creativity, collaboration and communication skills, executive functioning, and flexibility—skills that are transferable to every professional context. Yet it’s impossible to promote scientific literacy without also considering accessible reading and writing instruction.

These works of poetry will inspire children to fight climate change, prepare them for a new sibling, teach them to be courageous and compassionate, and make them think as well as laugh.

A growing group of experts and educators are trying to figure out what the relationship should be between digital technology and reading instruction. Both reading and digital tech are world-expanding human inventions, and laptops and smartphones have arguably given humans unending opportunities to read more; you can access pretty much anything in print within a few seconds. In terms of “raw words,” the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham has said, kids read more now than they did a decade ago. But many reading experts suspect that the technology may also be changing how they read—that reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on the page.

On the 20th anniversary of ‘Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!,’ Willems reflects on his beleaguered bird, bad ideas, and being part of a community of picture-book authors in Western Mass. His books deal with big feelings — frustration, anxiety, disappointment — that are baked into simple stories. But he often stresses that “simple and easy are opposites,” said Tracey Keevan, his editor for over a decade, noting that behind the books is “a tremendous amount of thinking.”

In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine some of the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. Today’s topic is “evidence-based practice.” Jal says, “I like the idea of evidence-informed practice. That centers the notion that there is some evidence that educators should take into consideration but also the reality that there is much about any given situation that is context-specific and depends on the expertise of the local practitioner.”

Are we doing elementary students a disservice by focusing on skills and strategies over background knowledge when we teach reading? Natalie Wexler shares a study that gives evidence that prior knowledge is more important than general skill in reading comprehension, and she makes the case that this is one of the roots of the achievement gap.

A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country. The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read. Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.

Read and evaluated by each member of the NCTE Excellence in Children’s Poetry Award Committee, these titles are notable for their use of language, poetic devices, and application to children ages three to thirteen. The form or structure of the poems was evaluated to ensure that the mood and subject matter were accurately represented. This year’s picks include a range of formats—lively nonfiction, reflective verse, and moving verse novels—written by familiar poets and debut authors.

NPR’s Miles Parks talks with Traci Sorell and Arigon Starr about their children’s book “Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series.” OK, picture this. It’s 1911. You’re at the World Series. The Philadelphia Athletics and the New York Giants are dueling it out for the title. It ends with the Philly A’s winning a thrilling six-game series.

Surrounded by almond groves in the rural town of Winton, about 10 miles northwest of Merced in California’s Central Valley, Frank Sparkes Elementary serves mostly low-income Latino students, and more than half are English learners. That’s not unlike many schools in California. More than 1 in 3 children enter school in California not yet proficient in English. But Frank Sparkes Elementary stands apart from other schools and offers a model of what is possible. Fifty-four percent of English learners at this school are reading and writing at grade level by third grade, according to their scores on Smarter Balanced, the state’s standardized test. That’s more than four times the average in California – only 12.5% of English learners in third grade statewide met or exceeded the standard in English language arts in 2022.

Low statewide reading scores have sparked many advocates to call for California to adopt a so-called structured literacy curriculum that emphasizes phonics and follows the science of reading. English learner advocates have raised concerns that districts may focus too much on phonics and other foundational skills and ignore other important skills that English learners need. So what does the research say about what English learners need when learning to read? Tim Shanahan, chair of the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth is known for helping to lead the National Reading Panel and co-editor of “Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners,” answers questions.

A remarkable long-term study by University of Virginia researchers led by David Grissmer demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge sequence. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension. And we might be further along in raising reading achievement, closing achievement gaps, and broadly improving education outcomes if we’d been listening to him for the last few decades.

My Powerful Hair is Indigenous author Carole Lindstrom’s new children’s book. It is inspired by her grandmother, who was forced to cut off her hair to try to remove her from Native culture. Lindstrom is the author of the award-winning book, We Are Water Protectors.

A substantial amount of time and energy is currently being spent on the so-called “reading wars,” with efforts to pit “science of reading” advocates against those labeled as “whole language” proponents. How might a teacher navigate this situation? Here’s a response from teacher Christie Nold. He says, “As always, it will be important to lead from a place of support and guidance that brings needed resources into our schools. It will not be enough to remove practices; instead, we need to equip educators with the tools to continue to grow in their craft.”

More school districts are interested in using reading programs designed to build students’ broad knowledge about the world by focusing their reading and writing on specific topics in social studies, science, and the arts. Now, a new study of one of these approaches has shown strongly positive results for students’ reading comprehension. The program is the Core Knowledge Sequence, a set of guidelines for the content and skills that students should learn in pre-K-8. Developed by the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, the approach is based on the work of education researcher E.D. Hirsch, who has argued for decades that students’ reading comprehension hinges on wide-ranging background knowledge—a shared “cultural literacy.”

April is here, and so is Autism Acceptance Month! This month, which includes World Autism Day (April 2 of every year), is a time for uplifting autistic voices and sharing in the community’s joy. But for Samantha Edwards, an autistic content creator and neurodivergent life coach, the month also signifies an influx of harmful myths about autistic people. “April is a wonderful month to crack down on that and listen to autistic voices and their stories and listen to their struggles,” she says. “Acceptance, at the end of the day, is going to promote more inclusivity.”

Character-switching stories can nurture imaginative play, teach early learners empathy, and foster social and emotional learning. Picture books that propose to answer the question “What might happen if you really switched places with someone else?” encourage children to imagine, predict, and reflect on the benefits and challenges of such an occurrence. Teachers can utilize a T-Chart graphic organizer to help students identify and document the benefits and challenges of characters who trade places with another character.

Building students’ general knowledge can lead to dramatic long-term improvements in reading comprehension, a new study suggests—casting serious doubt on standard teaching approaches. A rigorous study involving more than 2,000 students has found that children who got a content-rich, knowledge-building curriculum for at least four years, beginning in kindergarten, significantly outperformed their peers on standardized reading comprehension tests. Students from low-income families made such dramatic gains that their performance on state tests equaled that of children from higher-income families.

During April—Autism Acceptance Month—I hope you take a moment to step back and listen to the youth and adults who are part of a movement to change the way we refer to them, using identity-first language, as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network encourages. Just as the Deaf community doesn’t want to be called people with hearing impairments since they see the value of Deaf culture, so, too, do the autistics in the world have a right to a cultural voice. Some neurodiverent people prefer different terminology than what many educators are used to.

When social and emotional learning is integrated into language arts, elementary students gain a deeper understanding of concepts like empathy and self-awareness. And they’re more engaged in reading and writing, to boot.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew talks to Big Tree author Brian Selznick about trees, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and how he made a hopeful children’s book about our environmental crisis.

Melissa Knapp is Harpeth Valley Elementary School’s only literacy coach. It’s her job to guide teachers on how to help struggling readers at the 600-student school. She’s always busy, but this year, Knapp is fielding more questions than usual. Only a few months remain before Tennessee third-grade students take a state reading test — students who don’t pass could be held back a year. The retention policy is part of a state law passed in 2021 that was meant to boost long-lagging reading scores and stem pandemic learning losses.

The American school system has long been unequal — both in the depth of the need and resources to meet it. But while the pandemic affected all schools in profound ways, research shows it did more damage to those that were already the most vulnerable, with the recovery harder and slower. For students who were learning from home, especially those in low-income families, the challenges were acute. Many lacked reliable internet, a quiet place to study and a parent on-site to make sure they paid attention. “We turned off schools and inequality grew a lot,” said Tom Kane, faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, who helped create the Education Recovery Scorecard, a project of Harvard and Stanford universities.

As the state prepares to roll out universal preschool, a new taxpayer-funded program starting in the next school year that offers preschool hours for free to all 4-year-olds and some younger children, officials have given priority to children who don’t speak English at home. The state will offer those children more hours of tuition-free preschool and is promising — for the first time — that programs will need to use teaching strategies proven to help multilingual learners. Big questions still remain about whether enough is being done to get the word out, what programming will look like, and what help providers will get to improve their offerings.

In a push to get parents to enroll their children in summer school this year, a group of national education organizations is taking to the streets of six major cities to dispel widespread misconceptions that their children are doing OK in school. The advertising campaign will target the six cities—Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, Sacramento County in California, and Washington, D.C.—with displays of side-by-side data showing the percentage of students proficient in math or English in that city and the percentage of parents who think their child is at or above grade level in that subject.

Google is making it easier for people with reading challenges, such as dyslexia, to be able to make out articles and text posts online. The tech giant has launched “reader mode” for Chrome, which takes a site’s primary content and puts it into the sidebar to reduce clutter and distractions. Users will also be able to change the text’s typeface, font size and spacing, as well as its color and background color, to find the combination that works best for them.

What do the educators whose job it is to teach children how to read think about screening for reading delays in the early grades? We asked Doug Rich. He’s a 27-year veteran educator, former classroom teacher of grades 1 through 4, and a current math and reading interventionist at McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District, where he works with “Tier 2” students (those identified as at risk for delays). He’s also a father of two sons with dyslexia. Rich shared his professional journey in teaching literacy—how he came to learn about the disorder, his adoption of simple screeners to identify reading delays in students, and his structured and individualized approach to teaching students how to read.

In “The Manifestor Prophecy,” 12-year-old Nic Blake draws supernatural strength from her “Remarkable” African American forebears. Nic Blake, the heroine of Angie Thomas’s debut middle grade novel, and her dad are Manifestors: highly revered master wizards in a secret league of gifted people called the Remarkables. One of the things that makes “The Manifestor Prophecy” such a joyful read is the way legends of American history come to life in its speculative world.

“Sesame Street” is ramping up its focus on autism with a collection of new resources and additional efforts at its theme parks. Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind the venerable television show, unveiled videos, a storybook and printable activity guides this week featuring Julia, a 4-year-old Muppet with autism. The online content is part of “Sesame Street and Autism: See Amazing in All Children,” an initiative that began in 2015 to support families of those with autism and raise public awareness of the developmental disability.

While many schools already used digital tools in their teaching of reading prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, extended periods of remote or hybrid schooling certainly quickened the pace and appetite for technology. As this hybrid learning experience involving books and screens becomes more commonplace, it’s important for educators to understand the strengths of each format, particularly around reading and understanding content. Here are examples that show the strengths and weaknesses of print and digital experiences for four reading instruction priorities.

As more state legislatures seek to pass “science of reading” legislation this session, some teachers’ unions are mounting opposition—citing concerns about mandates that would limit teachers’ professional autonomy in the classroom and what they argue are unreasonable implementation timelines. Many of these bills propose a wholesale restructuring of how reading is taught, mandating new training for teachers, prescribing lists of curriculum materials, and banning teaching methods that aren’t backed by research. In pushing back against the proposals, the teachers’ unions are trying to walk a fine political line: affirming the need for strong instruction, while defending teachers’ professional autonomy to use the methods they think work best.

In M.T. Anderson’s new novel, “Elf Dog & Owl Head,” is a kind of inverted Narnia story: Instead of children stumbling on a portal to a magical world, a scrappy dog scampers out of a magical world and into our own. The dog is Elphinore, one of the royal hunting hounds of the People Under the Mountain, a rather chilly, unfeeling band of subterranean elves.

Building strong social and emotional learning skills can help set the stage for students to become better readers. This article outlines five SEL competencies related to reading, and suggestions for strengthening SEL skills in reading instruction.

If you attended kindergarten prior to the mid-1990s you may recall lots of play, singing, and graham crackers. Over the years, there has been a shift as kindergarten has become more structured and academic, with limited play and outdoor time. Research has shown that children learn best when they are engaged in developmentally appropriate experiences and activities: play! A developmentally appropriate kindergarten environment can support children socially and emotionally and foster positive relationships with peers and adults.

April is National Arab American Heritage Month. We now live in an education climate that is working on creating a more culturally responsive curriculum to honor the stories and histories of the many communities that made this country what it is today. This should be no different for Arab and Muslim American stories. Here are the ways teachers can best support their Arab and Muslim students through a social studies lens:

Travis here with your annual reminder that April is National Poetry Month. So it’s the perfect time for book spine centos. Give one a try. Or try it with your students/patrons. Here are my tips for creating a book spine cento.

The compelling new 80-minute documentary, “The Right to Read,” exposes the nation’s literacy crisis through the lives of NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, rookie first-grade teacher Sabrina Causey, and the many Oakland children they engage as they teach them to read, and also families across the country. The documentary vividly puts a human face on the grim statistic that only a third of American fourth-graders can read well enough to qualify as proficient on the 2022 NAEP exam, known as the nation’s report card.

Opportunities to use poetry to develop students’ literacy skills can pop up across the curriculum all year long. I hope that sprinkling poetry throughout the year in smaller bites helps students experience an essential literary art form without detracting from the set curriculum, and in turn strengthens the argument that poetry takes on a more substantial role in the curriculum and in students’ lives. Here are some examples from my recent teaching, along with some ideas for the coming months.

Several years ago, officials at Pathways, an Alabama-based nonprofit that provides services and shelter for women and children who are homeless, learned that their clients needed more than a safe, temporary home: They needed child care, too. In November 2021, the Pathways Early Learning Center opened in the organization’s shelter in Birmingham, with the goal of providing immediate, stable and free child care to families experiencing homelessness.

Transitioning from a three-wheeler to a two-wheeler is both terrifying and thrilling (for kids and their grownups). Here are 16 picture books that will help children look forward to the experience.

Ohio’s teachers unions are pushing back against Gov. Mike DeWine’s attempt to make phonics-based “science of reading” methods the only way to teach reading in Ohio’s schools — but DeWine and state education officials are holding their ground. The presidents of both the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Federation of Teachers praised DeWine for making literacy a priority in a new state budget bill. But both object to DeWine’s attempt in that same bill to make Ohio one of the first states to ban teachers using “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — in reading lessons. That strategy is a large part of long-used teaching approaches like whole language or balanced literacy.

Jason Reynolds is the recipient of the 2023 Margaret A. Edwards Award for his books When I Was the Greatest, The Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys, Ghost, and Long Way Down. School Library Journal is excited to invite their readers to submit questions to Reynolds, a selection of which he will answer in a live Instagram event on March 30 at 3:00 pm ET and SLJ’s June 2023 issue. Ask about his books, the award, or anything else you’ve always wanted to know!

In a Texas A&M Collaborative webinar, educator Kimberly Parker shared strategies for how teachers can embrace students’ multifaceted reading lives and help them build positive relationships with reading. Texts should vary in difficulty and length, Parker said, pulling from work by literacy researcher Tim Shanahan. Independent reading during the school day gives students an opportunity to strengthen their reading skills with minimal pressure. Parker encourages teachers and parents to work with kids and not against them when it comes to choosing reading materials. “Text should be broadly viewed to include print, digital and visual media,” she said.

Some districts with substantial numbers of low-income Latino students vastly outperform others when it comes to reading and writing. The results appear to have more to do with how schools are teaching students to read and less about their family’s income or their English proficiency. That’s according to a new report from the California Reading Coalition, a literacy advocacy group made up of organizations of educators, advocates and researchers.

New York City education officials plan to take a stronger hand in what curriculums educators can use in their classrooms, a move that could represent a major shift in how the nation’s largest school system approaches teaching and learning. The education department recently began laying the groundwork for superintendents to choose from three reading programs to use across their districts.

While kindergarten was founded by Friedrich Froebel, a male educator and philosopher, women played a consequential role in advancing kindergarten in the United States. In honor of Women’s History Month, and the contributions women continue to make to kindergarten education today, let’s take a look at how kindergarten took off in the U.S.

At KIPP Indy Public Schools in Indianapolis, using bus drivers as tutors was an unusual idea spurred by the pandemic. In October 2022, when struggles with reading among K-3 students prompted the school to find solutions, KIPP started the program. Each morning, students are pulled out of class into the hallway for 10 to 20 minutes to practice literacy skills such as sight words and phonics. It’s one approach to teaching using the science of reading, a body of research about how children learn to read.

Neurodivergence is underrecognized in childhood. To better reach all learners, teachers can employ a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework that centers choice, balance, and self-esteem to establish baseline practices inclusive of neurodivergence.

Every picture book has three stories. The first is how the book came to be, which is interesting in its own right but may be unknown to us. The second is the one told in the book. The third is what lingers in the reader’s mind after it ends. Two new picture books — each a young boy’s portrait of his nature-loving immigrant grandparent and their precious time together — powerfully interweave these three stories.

One state took a different path with good initial results. Since 2021, over 30,000 Tennessee educators have participated in Reading 360 training, and the feedback has been striking: 97 percent of teachers said they felt equipped to apply what they learned in the training in their classrooms. Teachers report stronger outcomes and earlier reading success in early grades.

Research has repeatedly shown dyslexia is associated with specific cognitive strengths. These include visual-spatial processing, narrative memory, problem-solving, and reasoning. While there is still a lot to learn about these advantages and how they work, in this video we unpack what we know about dyslexia, and what many studies have concluded about these strengths.

Experts say it’s possible to drastically expand tutoring. Millions more students can get the help they need, the experts said, if leaders are willing to do what it takes. Chalkbeat asked a dozen experts how to ramp up effective tutoring. One effective strategy: schedule tutoring during the school day.

Julie Stivers is the 2023 School Librarian of the Year. The librarian at Mount Vernon Middle School, an alternative, public, academic-recovery school in Raleigh, NC, has spent the last nine years creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for the school’s students, who fell behind or were left back for a variety of reasons. She has built a collection that reflects the community of students and their interests, fostering a love of reading along the way, as well as running in-person and virtual clubs and community reads and checking in with families as she strives to make a difference through personal relationships.

A bill introduced this month would have fulfilled a longtime dream of advocates for dyslexic children — universal screening for the learning disability so more Colorado students could get the reading help they need. But before the bill even got a hearing, a key lawmaker signaled it won’t move forward after opposition from some educators and state education groups. Advocates say the early elementary reading assessments approved by the state aren’t all designed to detect everyone at risk for the learning disability, which means young students fall through the cracks at a time when extra help would do the most good. But opponents of the bill say it would impose too many requirements as schools continue to recover from pandemic-era disruptions and work to comply with other recent reading-related laws.

Students who want to read about dinosaurs, delve into English literature classics, or just immerse themselves in a good story have plenty of options: Traditional paper books, e-readers, audio books, tablets, computer screens, even their phones or smart watches. When it comes to learning, however, are all these mediums created equal? Which are best for comprehension, and which are best for younger students? And how will the increasing digitization of books reshape reading instruction? To unpack those questions, Education Week spoke with Maryann Wolf, the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Wolf is also the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.

An intense program in phonological awareness can help middle school students who are struggling to keep up with reading. In the district program described here, As secondary educators, teachers received early literacy instruction with a Pathways to Reading trainer, and we read David Kilpatrick’s book Equipped for Reading Success. All students except one gained three to five levels on the PAST. Teachers also noted gains in vocabulary, stamina, discussion skills, and general attitude toward reading. Alongside the students, the educators learned both research and instructional strategies for helping striving middle school readers.

If you argue that rock ’n’ roll is one of the biggest forces to shape global culture in the 20th century, then you must conclude that Sister Rosetta Tharpe, often called “the Godmother of Rock ’n’ Roll,” is one of the world’s most important 20th-century figures. It is good news that we now have two fine picture books about her. Before her, guitarists played the blues, and mostly sat down doing it, or they were part of a jazz band’s rhythm section, underpinning the soloists who stood in front. Tharpe stepped out, displaying the kind of virtuosic physical bravado we associate with Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, not to mention all the others who have modeled themselves on that trio since.

Studies show that kids tend to score worse on comprehension tests after reading digital text than they do after reading something on a printed page. Even so, researchers say the evidence is too nuanced to say conclusively that reading physical books is superior. And some new research even shows that in certain cases, with young emerging readers, digital books outperform their print counterparts. Instead of feeling like they need to choose one or the other, elementary teachers should focus on figuring out the best ways to support kids’ comprehension in both print and digital formats.