Today’s Literacy Headlines

Acclaimed children’s book author and photo-illustrator April Pulley Sayre, known for her many books spotlighting the wonders of science and nature, died on November 6 in South Bend, Indiana. She was 55. Sayre created more than 80 books for young readers, many of them praised for their rhythm and clever wordplay. Sayre and her husband Jeffrey Sayre, an author, naturalist, and conservationist, traveled to 27 countries during their years together., and Sayre visited with more than 17,000 students across the country each year. “I try to communicate the excitement I feel about nature and my fascination with the way scientists discover how nature works,” she told Something About the Author in 1997. “I also feel it’s important to write about the environmental problems our planet faces and what’s being done to solve those problems.” Andrea Welch, executive editor of Beach Lane Books and Sayre’s longtime editor there, shared this remembrance: “April was endlessly curious about nature and a poet and artist at heart, and this was reflected in each of the 12 picture books we made together. She loved to explore beneath the surface of things, and it was always so fun to be along for the ride. We had long conversations on topics ranging from leaves to lemurs to an especially charismatic frog living in her pond that she named Lemon. I’ll never forget the time she asked for an extension one spring because she had been distracted by ‘an excessive amount of cuteness going on in the yard.’ Though I will miss April tremendously, it’s comforting to know that her books will continue to give children the gift of seeing and appreciating the natural world from her inimitable point of view.”

In this audio interview, author and cartoonist Jeff Kinney discusses his career and book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Kinney talks about how he got a book deal at Comic-Con, how he utilizes systematic inventive thinking to help his writing process, how he balances both jokes and big ideas throughout his books, and what it’s like going on book tours for children.

Relationship skills, social awareness, and self-management are essential social and emotional learning (SEL) tools to add to our learners’ tool kit to help them navigate all their new experiences in life and in learning. Below are three SEL signature practices from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Within each of these practices, we share methods specifically designed for early childhood.

Many schools rely on paraprofessionals to give specialized support to teachers. But Rehobeth Elementary School (located in southeast Alabama) says trained and experienced aides are key to recent success. The school recently led peer mid- to high-poverty schools in reading scores, and in closing racial and socioeconomic gaps. Now, as the school, like many around Alabama, wrestles with dips in achievement scores from the pandemic and considers the impact of a third-grade reading law, staff are doubling down on the presence of Title I aides. And they’re expanding that expertise in developing a team of trained reading educators as they work on afterschool tutoring and community support.

Instead of candy bars and bags of chips, a new vending machine at Manhattan’s Mosaic Preparatory Academy dispenses children’s books. Students can earn “coupons” for being good Samaritans, such as helping out a peer or cleaning up without being asked. Once they earn five coupons, they can exchange them for a token that unlocks a book from the machine for them to take home. The machine is one way that Lisette Caesar, Mosaic’s principal, is trying to boost literacy among her roughly 200 students after one and a half school years without full-time, in-person school.

After months of deliberation, the editors and our insightful reviewer committee members have selected 139 titles addressing topics—such as climate change, racism, and history—that are more relevant than ever. They also include a balance of fantasy, historical and realistic fiction, and, for the first time in years, a breakout list of poetry. There’s a nice sprinkle of story time picks and slice-of-life tales. We hope that these will be helpful resources to meet the needs (and wants) of the children in your libraries and classrooms.

A first-of-its-kind study from the University of Kansas (KU), examining three key cognitive functions and their role in learning to write, suggests that insufficient focus on bilingual education has hindered the progress of Hispanic English learners (ELs). The KU study showed specifically how important word retrieval skills, verbal language skills, and ability to store information in memory are to writing ability.

The National Council of Teachers of English has announced the winners of the 2022 Orbis Pictus and Charlotte Huck awards. The Orbis Pictus Award was established in 1989 to recognize excellence in nonfiction for children. The 2022 winner is Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd, illus. by Christian Robinson. The Charlotte Huck Award was established in 2014 to honor excellence in children’s fiction writing. The 2022 winner is Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls by Kaela Rivera.

From soul food on Sundays and tamales on Christmas Eve to wu gok on Dumpling Day. In Tomatoes for Neela, a twinkly-eyed Indian American girl makes tomato sauce with her amma every summer, when the juicy, plump fruits are in season. Lakshmi’s language infuses the ritual with magic — a cookbook from the girl’s paati looks “old and important,” as if it’s “full of spells.”

Around the country, school librarians have found themselves on the front lines of the culture wars. As states pass laws that restrict teaching of “controversial” or “divisive” subjects, school libraries have seen calls to remove books about issues like race, gender, and sexuality from their shelves.

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, two of the biggest names in literacy education, are breaking their silence in the debate over how best to teach kids to read, responding to criticism that their ideas don’t align with reading science. At the center of the controversy are teaching techniques that encourage children to use context, pictures and sentence structure, along with letters, to identify words. Fountas and Pinnell reiterated their allegiance to this approach in their blog.

When students make observations, they learn how to describe what they see, interpret the images, and then make deeper connections. When students are able to fully “read” images, they can understand beyond the text and delve deeply into the author’s message. Imagine close reading, but instead of text, they’re examining images. Visual literacy encompasses the ability to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. The beauty of visual literacy is that it opens the door for other language arts standards to be woven into your lessons, and it accommodates all learners from pre-K to fifth grade.

Reading, writing and math are often thought of as subjects that children learn in school. But as a psychologist who researches how families can help support learning at home, I have found that children can also learn those skills through everyday tasks and chores. One of these chores is preparing a meal – everything from grocery shopping and cooking to setting the table and enjoying the meal. Our research shows this is especially true for Latino families living in the U.S., many of whom are new to school systems in the U.S. but for whom family dinners are a central part of the day.

The new question-of-the-week is: What are your recommendations for how best to set up and organize small groups in classroom instruction? Assigning student roles, choosing the right number of members, and providing feedback are among the strategies teachers can use.

We have been effective in conveying that SEL helps young people develop the skills to succeed in school and life, enables educators to create safe and inclusive learning environments, and promotes the overall well-being of young people. Our next step is to help parents understand the different ways in which schools approach SEL instruction through a combination of direct instruction, integration into academics, creation of identity-safe communities within classrooms and schools, and provision of service-learning opportunities that deepen social and cognitive skill development. None of these strategies takes time away from academic learning; rather, they expedite and deepen academic learning.

In classrooms across the country, the first months of school this fall have laid bare what many in education feared: Students are way behind in skills they should have mastered already. Children in early elementary school have had their most formative first few years of education disrupted by the pandemic, years when they learn basic math and reading skills and important social-emotional skills, like how to get along with peers and follow routines in a classroom. While experts say it’s likely these students will catch up in many skills, the stakes are especially high around literacy.

Helping students grow their social and emotional skills has become a big part of school counselors’ jobs, particularly given the impact of the pandemic on student mental health and behavioral issues. But it’s also time-consuming, difficult work, and counselors need more support and resources, according to a report released this week by ACT and the American School Counselors Association, based on a survey done last year of counselors and district officials.

Cognitive scientists have long understood that you need to first have some knowledge—either of the topic or of general academic vocabulary—in order to gain knowledge from written text, especially as it gets more complex. To acquire academic vocabulary, many students need coherent, systematic instruction in a series of topics that give them repeated exposure to the same concepts and words in varied contexts over a period of weeks. That’s especially true for children from less educated families who are less likely to acquire academic vocabulary outside school. A half-dozen or so recently developed literacy curricula do a good job of building kids’ knowledge, but most of those in use—including Calkins’ and Fountas and Pinnell’s curricula—don’t.

The border guard steps over to the car and asks the woman inside to declare her citizenship. “Blackfoot,” she responds. Thus begins the impasse that defines Borders, a graphic novel adapted by Natasha Donovan from the short story by Thomas King. The narrator and his mother are traveling from Canada to the United States. When the mother refuses to declare any citizenship other than Blackfoot, the Americans turn her away, and when she returns to the Canadian border post, the same thing happens. She and her young son are trapped in the gray area between borders. The story is a meditation on citizenship and nationality, as well as a testament to the fact that before any European set foot in North America, hundreds of sovereign nations stretched from coast to coast—sovereign nations that still exist. Borders is one of a growing number of graphic novels by and about Native people depicting a wide range of experiences and cultures.

Keishia Thorpe immigrated to the U.S. as a child, hoping for a better life than the poverty she came from in Jamaica. She’s now a teacher in Maryland — and her devotion to preparing young immigrants to succeed just brought her international recognition and $1 million, via the Global Teacher Prize. “This recognition is not just about me, but about all the dreamers who worked so hard and dare to dream of ending generational poverty,” she said in Paris, where the award ceremony was held via video conference. “This is to encourage every little Black boy and girl that looks like me and every child in the world that feels marginalized and has a story like mine and felt they never mattered.

More than a dozen studies have documented that students, on average, made sluggish progress in reading during the pandemic. Mackenzie Woll, a second grade teacher at Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, said diagnostic tests at the start of the year revealed that most of her students were reading at a kindergarten or a first grade level. In previous years, some students would come in reading above grade level; this year, no one in her class did. Woll now reviews kindergarten-level phonics with her second graders. In a normal year, the exercise would have been scaled back by this point, Woll says. “But because of the pandemic, I’m still doing those letter sounds every day.”

The judges select the 10 winners purely on the basis of artistic merit. On the 2021 panel were Catherine Hong, a children’s literature critic; Jessica Agudelo, a youth collections librarian at the New York Public Library; and Paul O. Zelinsky, a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator of many acclaimed picture books — most recently “Red and Green and Blue and White,” by Lee Wind — and a past winner of the award.

A look at the artists behind this year’s winning books, in their studios.

Parents and students gave emotional testimony on Tuesday about struggling to read in a hyper-literate society, kicking off a renewed effort by Michigan lawmakers to pass a package of bills designed to help struggling young readers. The bills require school districts to screen students for dyslexia characteristics and increase teacher training requirements so teachers are better able to identify and address reading problems.

Since focusing on reading interventions, Midlothian’s (TX) reading STAAR scores have beat the state and regional averages. While the district as a whole serves relatively low numbers of poor students, its highest poverty campus — Vitovsky — has stayed relatively in line with the state on standardized tests in recent years. And while the pandemic clearly caused setbacks among most students, initial results from Midlothian’s first screening assessment this year were promising, Becki Krsnak, Midlothian’s director of curriculum and instruction said. Teachers who have embraced the science of reading among lower grades are already seeing gains.

Two of the nation’s most popular early literacy programs that have been at the center of a debate over how to best teach reading both faced more new critiques in the past few weeks, receiving bottom marks on an outside evaluation of their materials. EdReports—a nonprofit organization that reviews K-12 instructional materials in English/language arts, math, and science—published its evaluation of Fountas and Pinnell Classroom Tuesday, finding that the program didn’t meet expectations for text quality or alignment to standards. The release comes on the heels of the group’s negative evaluation last month of the Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, another popular early reading program. Together, the two reports received the lowest ratings EdReports has given for K-2 curricula in English/language arts, and they’re among the three lowest for ELA in grades 3-8.

Teachers across the country are seeing more and more students struggle with reading this school year. Pandemic school closures and remote instruction made learning to read much harder, especially for young, low-income students who didn’t have adequate technology at home or an adult who could assist them during the day. Many older students lost the daily habit of reading. Even before the pandemic, nearly two-thirds of U.S. students were unable to read at grade level. Scores had been getting worse for several years. The pandemic made a bad situation worse.

November is Native American Heritage Month. As we celebrate and honor Native and Indigenous peoples and nations, here are 22 titles to share with children and teens.

In response to COVID protocols, many school librarians were forced from their space and reassigned as tech support, mobile services providers, and classroom teachers. This is Ohio media specialist Joseph Vernacotola’s story.

Multilingual learners possess a diverse array of experiences and skills that contribute to the dynamics of the learning environment and their own academic success. We can provide multilingual students with opportunities to actively engage in translanguaging, the practice of students having opportunities to engage in the learning process by using their linguistic repertoire to support linguistic growth in their target language.

The full impact of the pandemic on kids’ health and fitness won’t be known for some time. But it’s already caused at least a short-term spike in childhood obesity. Rates of overweight and obesity in 5- through 11-year-olds rose nearly 10 percentage points in the first few months of 2020. Now, as schools scramble to help kids catch up academically, there are signs that PE is taking a back seat to the core subjects yet again. Some PE teachers say their students’ social-emotional skills have suffered more than their gross motor skills. “They forgot how to share; how to be nice to each other; how to relate to each other,” said Donn Tobin, an elementary PE instructor in New York. PE has a key role to play in boosting those skills, which affect how kids interact in other classes, said Will Potter, an elementary PE teacher in California.

We are the first storytellers on this continent. But despite the increasing visibility of Native and First Nations today, many readers are still new to our ways of making sense of the world through literature. Our stories often feature distinct, Indigenous literary styles and cultural references. Joyfully, the community of Native and First Nations writers creating books for children and teens keeps growing. For those new to the Native literary conversation, we give the same advice we offer to beginning writers. Read. Broadly. Extensively. Frequently. Read a wide array of Native voices. Realize that while patterns will emerge, individual approaches vary.

At the Giselle Learning Academy in Clarkston, it’s midmorning and toddler energy is loosed in all the classrooms, from children galloping, counting and building with blocks. Their delight in their activities is obvious. Less obvious is how each of the activities advances language and literacy skills, from teachers repeating key words to the children to engaging them in conversation on the floor mats. “Play is the highest form of learning,” said Giselle director Alexandra Cesar. “It is important that learning and teaching are blended with play.”

Despite its drawbacks, the online encyclopedia has value, particularly for those just getting started with research. Wikipedia is far from a perfect platform, but if we encourage students to recognize its strengths and flaws as they participate in improving this collective chronicle of our species and our understanding of the universe, we can teach many valuable lessons: how to know what is true, that each student’s voice matters, and that together, we can accomplish great things.

School librarians hear the question all the time: Why do we need school libraries and school librarians when students have the internet? Meanwhile, the number of school librarians in the U.S. has dropped about 20% over the past decade, according to a July 2021. Here are four functions that school librarians carry out that I believe make their role more important now than ever: foster digital literacy, champion the joy of reading, help teachers enhance their lessons, and seek out creative, diverse materials.

From Paralympics to disability rights, these books highlight the stories of young people with disabilities achieving their dreams. They will serve to both empower and inspire young readers.

For students who learn or think differently, a strong network of support is key. That network includes two critical players: teachers and parents. During the pandemic, it’s been harder than ever to bridge the communication gap between families and schools, especially during remote learning. How can these two groups develop better strategies and avenues for effective communication? That’s the central question we invited our Twitter followers to answer during a Twitter chat last month. Here are 6 key lessons learned about facilitating better communication, as told by the chat participants.

New data on academic performance for 1st through 8th grade students this fall in reading and math show that across the board, students are not doing as well as their peers were before the pandemic. The declines were particularly bad in math. The report, from curriculum and assessment provider Curriculum Associates, found that fewer students are on grade level in early reading and in upper elementary and middle school math than in years past. The numbers are lowest in schools that serve majority Black and Latino students, and in schools in lower-income ZIP codes. The data confirm what other analyses have found about the pandemic’s effect on student learning.

The U.S. is currently resettling more than 55,000 Afghans, with an additional 125,000 refugees from around the world expected to arrive by the end of next year. Because a large proportion of newcomers are school-aged children, American schools will be essential in welcoming these newcomers, as we have learned as public health researchers studying the adjustment and wellbeing of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. With schools across the country preparing for these new arrivals amid continued fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, we share key insights we have learned from speaking with hundreds of high school students and family members, school faculty and staff, district leaders, and civil society representatives over the past four years.

The latest data on how English-learners around the country fared in their language development during the pandemic are out. But there’s a major catch: About 30 percent fewer students took a widely used standardized assessment in 2021 than did two years prior, making the data difficult to analyze over time.

Want students to succeed in math and reading? Nurture their curiosity and persistence. Across 11 countries, those two skills are the most closely linked to better academic performance for both 10- and 15-year-olds, according to the first international survey of social-emotional skills. Rather than ranking countries’ average social-emotional performance, the study analyzed the way social-emotional skills affected students’ performance. Students in a wide array of educational systems and learning contexts still showed that the development of social skills ranging from trust and creativity to assertiveness could boost students’ performance in core academic subjects.

It’s uplifting to see young people taking climate matters into their own hands and demanding action. But at the same time, they’re suffering from levels of eco-anxiety that are off the scale compared to anything I experienced at their age. Thankfully, writers and illustrators are responding to this new reality and making books that not only connect readers to animals and nature, as children’s books always have, but also help them understand what’s going on and reassure them that there are ways to defend our troubled planet.

Whether you’re grappling with homework or just trying to get things done, these tools will help your tech adapt to you—instead of the other way around. In honor of Dyslexia Awareness Month this October, I reached out to several assistive technology experts to find out what technology they recommend for facilitating and improving reading, writing, spelling, and math. Here’s what Jamie Martin, Assistive Technology Specialist at the New England Assistive Technology Center and Karen Janowski, Assistive & Educational Technology Consultant at EdTech Solutions and co-author of Inclusive Learning 365 recommend. Although Janowski offers one caveat:

The country could soon see a significant federal investment in young children. One area yet to be addressed is what the expansion means for how kindergarten and the early grades must transform. To maximize the benefits of investing in and strengthening ECE options for infants, toddlers, and pre-kindergarteners, decision-makers must strengthen what comes next: kindergarten, first, and second grade.

After five years of strengthening its dual language program, Texas’ San Antonio Independent School District now uses an 80-20 immersion model for all of its emergent bilingual students, marking a policy change that ensures more educational equity for the district’s bilingual students. It starts with a mix of 80% Spanish and 20% English in pre-K, then adds more English every year until 4th grade when it becomes 50-50. San Antonio ISD’s student population is 90% Latinx, with many from families that continue to speak Spanish at home.

Ask any elementary or middle school librarian about the most circulated books in their collection, and they will no doubt mention “Diary of Wimpy Kid.” Jeff Kinney’s series has been a favorite since the first title was released in 2007. In the ensuing 14 years, 15 more books have chronicled Greg Heffley’s awkward middle school days and engaged even those students who are least enthusiastic about reading. For more than a decade, children have grown up laughing with (and at) Greg, Rowley, Rodrick, and the rest of the Plainview crew, who have stayed dependably the same.

Voice technology has become a familiar presence in the home, but now it’s on the verge of making a breakthrough into the classroom. Much of the focus on using voice tech is around helping children learn to read. While a teacher can work with a small group of children at a time, tech expands the amount of time children can practice, at the same time as collecting data on how they are progressing.

After spending years in the classroom, Jessica Reid Sliwerski decided to tap into her experience as an elementary school teacher and principal to teach as many kids as possible to read using a science-based methodology. When the coronavirus struck, upending education as we know it, she pivoted to Zoom tutorials led by Ignite! Reading, an initiative of her nonprofit Open Up Resources. Ignite is part of an emerging trend of high-tech literacy projects coming out of the pandemic.

Last year, schools ramped up social-emotional learning (SEL) to help students cope with the trauma of the pandemic and the nation’s racial reckoning. Now, many educators, buoyed by evidence of SEL’s value and parent surveys endorsing the emphasis on well-being in the classroom, say they are committed to SEL this year and beyond.

You might think that celebrated adult authors writing for kids is a new trend. It isn’t. From the Book Review archive: reviews of children’s books by Gertrude Stein, James Thurber, Langston Hughes, Graham Greene, and William Faulkner.

Policymakers often exclusively focus on reading when addressing literacy gaps. However, research shows that writing skills help students become better readers and ultimately understand all subjects better. Writing is agency, power and influence. Writing not only helps students master new material, but it also serves as a tool for self-expression, reflection and community building. Writing can create new worlds and bring imagination to life. In a society that has historically devalued the voices of young people of color, writing empowers them to tell their own stories, succeed in school and career, engage in our national dialogue and become leaders in a global information economy.

Bringing art to assessments, to increase vocabulary knowledge, and to practice grammar are ways teachers incorporate it in their classes.

While most elementary students are learning in person now, these tools are a big help in promoting literacy in or outside of the classroom: recording on a tablet or smartphone, Google slides, and Pixar shorts.

While we bring the mental health needs of our students into laser focus this year, it’s still crucial that we keep the social and emotional world of our English language learners (ELLs) front and center. Just like their peers, ELL students come to our classrooms with the burning need to be seen and acknowledged for their unique personalities, life experiences, and talents. Teachers of any subject can use these tips to help English language learners be more engaged and at ease in class.

Noticing what students do and say in the classroom, and then reflecting on how you respond, are how you build a classroom for English learners that is centered around their needs. Every year, my students teach me new lessons. Here are a few things I learned by listening to, observing, and working with my students.

The key to Eye to Eye’s popularity with students, said founder and CEO David Flink, is that students are paired with “near-peer” mentors who are like them — people who have learning differences. The mentors are college students who are only five or so years older than the students, which adds to the cool factor, Flink said. The mentors don’t tutor the students. Instead, they meet once a week for a school year and, using an arts-based curriculum, help build each student’s confidence, self-advocacy skills and recognition of their own strengths.

For those in the children’s literature world, Wednesday was yet another day of mourning and remembrance. This time, the loss was Caldecott-winning illustrator Jerry Pinkney, who died Wednesday at age 81. Pinkney was an industry giant—like so many of those who have gone before him in recent months, including Gary Paulsen, Eric Carle, Beverly Cleary, Floyd Cooper, Lois Ehlert, Eloise Greenfield, Norton Juster, and Kathleen Krull. Pinkney was the patriarch of a family of children’s literature creators, including wife Gloria Jean, son Brian, and daughter-in-law Andrea Davis Pinkney. His first book was The Adventures of Spider: West African Folk Tales, published in 1964. Over the next 50-plus years, he wrote or illustrated (or both) more than 100 children’s titles and won numerous awards and honors for his work.

Arts education is often an afterthought in schools, but Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, Professor and Chair of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks we’ve got it all wrong. In her new book, “How the Arts Can Save Education: Transforming Teaching, Learning and Instruction,” Halverson argues not only do the arts belong in schools, but the core tenets of arts learning belong in every classroom. Education should use the arts—and especially the process of how artists create their work—as a blueprint to re-make more effective learning.

The declaration was penned by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which together represent more than 77,000 physicians and 200 children’s hospitals. The groups say that rates of childhood mental health concerns were already steadily rising over the past decade. But the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the issue of racial inequality, they write, has exacerbated the challenges.

The celebrated illustrator Jerry Pinkney has died. According to his long-time agent Sheldon Fogelman, Pinkney suffered a heart attack today; he was 81. Pinkney was a legend in the world of children’s publishing. He won a Caldecott medal for his 2010 picture book The Lion and The Mouse; he also won five Coretta Scott King awards from the American Library Association and a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Illustrators. Over the course of a nearly six-decade long career, he left his mark on over a hundred books, mostly for kids and teenagers, beginning with The Adventures of Spider: West African Folk Tales in 1964.