Today’s Literacy Headlines

Schools are required to test the progress of their English learners each year to determine whether they still need language instruction services or can exit out of such programs. In close to 40 states, that test is known as the WIDA ACCESS test. Offered both online and in a paper format, ACCESS tests students’ proficiency in four domains: speaking, reading, listening, and writing in English. The questions are modeled along academic content they would see in regular classes. For instance, reading questions might be about a science topic. The test is checking for language use in academic contexts, not content knowledge nor social language. Teachers who specialize in English-language instruction say their general education peers play a key role in prepping students to succeed on the ACCESS test. 

I have always set up storytelling cultures in my own classrooms, and I‘ve helped teachers do the same in theirs. When I speak to colleagues about the concept, they accept the many benefits but pose a valid question: How do you maintain a culture of writing and storytelling? That’s something I’ve been exploring recently as I continue to visit my wife’s class daily, and the students continue to write stories and enjoy telling them to their peers. Here, I have some tips about how to achieve this, based on what I find works for this age group. 

Some of the most effective learning strategies are those known as desirable difficulties. Desirable difficulties increase challenge in a way that is useful and pedagogically appropriate. Examples of strategies that fall into this category include retrieval or self-testing, spacing out practice, variation in practice, self-explanation when reading notes, and interleaving. However, could it be the case that for some learners, there are already enough difficulties in the classroom, without adding more?

Do children’s books about frightening events make the very young more afraid, or do they comfort them? Two new picture books dive into refugee childhoods. Both “The Mango Tree” and “Simone” in gentle, moving ways [show] young children that yes, there is sadness and suffering in the world, but we have family and friends and other helpers to see us through.

Early-learning experiences have exponential power: they can shape lifelong learning habits and accelerate literacy, particularly for English-language learners. To unlock that potential, educators and providers must ensure that students acquire a critical mass of vocabulary and related content knowledge from engaging social studies and science texts and activities.Knowledge-rich preschool curriculum is the key. To assist states and preschool providers as they revisit their literacy lessons, the Knowledge Matter Campaign recently updated its K–8 English Language Arts curriculum review tool to include “Early Childhood Essentials.”

No doubt, books and empathy go hand-in-hand or, in this case, ear-to-ear. In a climate of contagious divisiveness, acknowledging and accepting all manner of differences is paramount to being good citizens and, most importantly, good people. For both May’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and beyond, consider lining shelves and adding to TBR piles with some of these edifying, entertaining 2024 choices.

Nathaniel Messick thought he’d learned a lot about reading. The biology teacher-turned-principal of the Fertile-Beltrami school in northwest Minnesota had little knowledge about “evidence-based” literacy instruction when he first took on the role in 2014, so he taught himself the basics by reading the teacher guides that were part of the school’s curriculum. Hoping to become more valuable as an instruction leader, he even put himself through the LETRS for Leaders training program, which took him deep into the research about how children learn to read. But Messick has had no time to rest on his laurels. In 2023, Minnesota became one of the 38 states to pass legislation overhauling how reading is taught. Like those others, the state is trying to shift towards a vast body of theoretical knowledge and practice called the “science of reading.”

As Ohio public school districts are starting to implement the science of reading, colleges and universities across the state will be examining their teacher preparation programs. Ohio’s two-year, $191 billion budget included science of reading provisions — $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.

Summer programs already offer less academic instruction than recommended, and the end of COVID-19 aid could impact that further, according to new RAND report.

Moving can be stressful for young children. The characters in these books are coping with a move and might offer comfort to students in similar situations.

Reading Reimagined, is a research-and-development initiative aimed at improving reading outcomes for students above second grade, especially those from historically disadvantaged and low-income communities. The project aims not only to fund research in that area but also to bridge the gap between research and practice, coming up with evidence-based solutions.

If you’re a parent struggling to get your kids’ off their devices and outdoors to play, here’s another reason to keep trying: Spending at least two hours outside each day is one of the most important things your kids can do to protect their eyesight. And that’s important, because the number of kids with nearsightedness — or myopia — has been growing rapidly in the U.S., and in many other parts of the world.

Starting in June, EdReports reviews of early reading materials will reflect a fuller embrace of the science of reading. “Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables” for a green rating, said Janna Chan, EdReports’ chief external affairs officer. Reviewers will also verify that materials no longer use “three-cueing” — a practice associated with balanced literacy that encourages students to identify unfamiliar words by picking up clues from text or pictures. Since 2021, at least 10 states have banned the practice.

A surge in students’ chronic absenteeism since the return to in-person classes hasn’t discriminated, threatening academic recovery in schools of all sizes and demographic makeups across the country. But schools that are finding success in combating the problem tend to have at least one thing in common: They’ve leveraged help from outside of school, including community groups, families, and political leaders.

Teachers with newcomer students in their classroom need to receive proper professional support in order to effectively welcome these students. Developing school-wide intake systems and creating support networks for educators are two ways schools can support teachers. 

People often blame smartphones and other digital distractions as the reason why so many kids today aren’t good readers. But the low reading proficiency rates of middle school students predate the advent of the smartphone, so the answer must lie elsewhere. An often-overlooked culprit may be the increasing demands placed on older students’ foundational literacy skills once they must independently read and comprehend complicated, discipline-specific texts.

Dyslexia affects one in every 5 Americans. But only 2 million are diagnosed and receive the help they need. Why? On Point interviews experts Tim Odegard, Murfree Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies at Middle Tennessee State University; and Clarice Jackson, founder of Black Literacy Matters, Voice Advocacy Center, and Decoding Dyslexia Nebraska, a nationwide parent support group created to raise awareness about dyslexia.

Special education staffing strategies often focus on recruiting and training new teachers in the specialty, but those efforts alone aren’t enough to address shortages in the high-demand field. That’s why states and districts have adopted workforce strategies that target the stress points special educators face: incentive payments to motivate them to stay in the specialty, professional development practices to help them feel less isolated in their school communities, and approaches to teacher preparation designed with retention in mind.

Tennessee prioritized the need for ESL teachers within their apprenticeship programs, offering dual endorsement in elementary education and ESL that can help general education teachers receive specialized training and learn the right skills to support ELs’ language development. As it stands, many teachers report a lack of preparation and limited professional development related to teaching students identified as ELs. By integrating ESL endorsements into teacher apprenticeship programs, there is an opportunity to offer more robust clinical training in classrooms and schools that serve these students and to apply coursework to a real-life context.

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

On any given day, you might find students from Centreville Elementary attending class at one of the school’s 17 outdoor learning spaces, taking a nature walk, checking on the trout they’ve grown from eggs in a classroom tank, or working with classmates on how they can apply the most recent United Nations’ sustainability goals to their own school community. Centreville Elementary is not an alternative school; nor is it set in a remote corner of the country. Situated in suburban Fairfax County in Virginia, it’s simply a public elementary school whose long-standing commitment to outdoor learning predates the pandemic—when many schools adopted outdoor learning as a way to return safely to in-person learning.

A new study finds that the percentage of preschoolers enrolled in state-funded programs is at a record high, but the actual number of enrolled students is below pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, the gap between states when it comes to access to quality early childhood education has become wider than ever.

Teachers can guide students to connect their interests to class texts and to share their ideas in collaborative discussions. Meaning-making  is especially important in reading experiences, as reading is a dynamic process. Provide learners time to think deeply about topics, share their unique understandings with each other, and build community. Here are several ways to begin — start with “why.”

Preschool classrooms can be filled with literacy-rich materials and opportunities for teachers to facilitate meaningful, contextualized learning throughout children’s day. Here are five ways that preschool teachers can create a literacy-rich environment that encourages children’s natural curiosity and meaningfully promotes emergent reading and writing skills.

What happens when school and district leaders prioritize working with families to improve the school experience? Everything from finding solutions to chronic absenteeism to launching innovative programs designed to improve students’ academic achievement.

It’s been 70 years since the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. That data showed considerable progress in integrating schools but also some steps backward, especially since the 1990s in the nation’s biggest cities. More detailed analysis of Black achievement explains how intertwined it is with poverty. So many Black students are concentrated in high-poverty schools, where teacher turnover is high and students are less likely to be taught by excellent, veteran teachers. 

Why the “decline by 9” in kids pleasure reading is getting more pronounced, year after year. And everyone I talked to agreed that the sudden drop-off in reading for fun is happening at a crucial age—the very age when, according to publishing lore, lifetime readers are made. “If you can keep them interested in books at that age, it will foster an interest in books the rest of their life,” said Brenna Connor, an industry analyst at Circana, the market research company that runs Bookscan. “If you don’t, they don’t want to read books as an adult.”

The first step to boosting reading scores statewide is believing that students can and will make great strides if educators are committed to seeing it happen. That was a key message from Carey Wright, who oversaw Mississippi’s education department during what many have called the “Mississippi Miracle”—a period of historic reading gains for the state that traditionally ranked among the lowest in the nation—in an on-stage interview at Education Week’s Leadership Symposium in Arlington, Va. Wright is now the state superintendent in Maryland

There are smart ways to provide teachers with better support, collaboration, compensation, advancement, and job flexibility opportunities to address the source of their discontent with teaching and put the job back on par with other college-educated professions. One of the best ways states and districts can do this is to rethink how we staff schools. Here are six synergistic approaches to doing this.

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we asked six authors to discuss their new and forthcoming books for young readers and the importance of highlighting their culture through literature.

I’m a linguist who investigates the differences between print and digital reading and how writing supports thinking. My colleague Anne Mangen and I asked more than 500 secondary students at an international school in Amsterdam about their experiences when reading print versus digital texts. Separately, I surveyed 100 university students and young adults in the U.S. and Europe on their likes and dislikes about handwriting versus typing. Together, their responses demonstrate that adolescents and young adults continue to value touch in their encounters with the written word. The research offers important lessons for educators and parents.

When literacy instruction aligns with reading science, adolescents routinely engage with rich, knowledge-building text sets about compelling topics. Teachers lean into text complexity through modeling and carefully crafted questions, lifting students to the text and guiding them toward deep comprehension. Evidence-based discussions and reasoning create a social, collaborative learning environment. Relevant culminating tasks motivate students to think critically and creatively and invest in discovery.

The science of reading isn’t so much a curriculum as it is an interconnected body of research that spans fields from neuroscience to developmental psychology to linguistics and everything in between. Through that work, researchers have been able to better understand not only how kids learn to read, but how best to teach them. One key thing to keep in mind is that learning to speak and learning to read are very different processes.

A 2023 review makes a strong case that hands-on observation of natural phenomena has both academic and psychological benefits. Nature journaling—sketching and annotating observations about natural phenomena—also builds crucial cognitive and processing skills like close observation, technical illustration, attention to detail, critical thinking, and the ability to organize and categorize information.

Special education students across the nation are increasingly likely to have autism, with new data showing that the percentage has more than doubled in recent years. Nearly 13% of students with disabilities had autism during the 2022-2023 school year. By comparison, just shy of 5% had such a diagnosis in 2008-2009. About 40% of those with autism spent at least 80% of their day in regular classrooms and roughly 72% ended their time in school by earning a regular high school diploma. The upward trend in the percentage of special education students with autism comes as overall prevalence has grown.

The double helix of reading and writing offers a framework for educators seeking to cultivate comprehensive literacy instruction across all grade levels. This metaphor, inspired by the intertwined strands of DNA, underscores the reciprocal and interdependent nature of reading and writing skills. By moving away from a compartmentalized approach that treats reading and writing as isolated entities, the double-helix model emphasizes reading as a foundation for writing and writing as a catalyst for reading comprehension.

Erika Lee and Christina Soontornvat’s “Made in Asian America” spotlights young people who defy erasure and make their own history. Although this is the young person’s adaptation of Lee’s “The Making of Asian America,” the authors neither simplify nor sanitize Asian American history for their audience. In fact, they deepen our history by interweaving personal accounts of young people during pivotal events through the ages, as well as adding coverage of major upheavals that occurred after Lee’s original book was published in 2015.

My guest today is the one… the only… the incredible Christopher Paul Curtis. Newbery Award and Honor winner. National Book Award Finalist. He’s also gotten the Regina Medal and the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. Most recently? He’s the winner of the 2024 Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. It was my utter honor to get a chance to send him some interview questions after his Lifetime Achievement award win … when I sent him questions, he didn’t just answer me. He took them and turned them into what is essentially an organic essay.

English learners’ average English-language proficiency scores have remained in decline since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new assessment data from the WIDA consortium.

Need suggestions for beach reading or books to bring to summer camp? Each of our lists — for all age ranges and including fiction, nonfiction, folklore, and poetry — includes thirteen selections (a baker’s dozen!), all published 2023–2024 and ideal for the season. Grade levels are only suggestions; the individual child is the real criterion.

We can offer students of all ages a deeper, more experiential way of learning. It all starts by making four intentional shifts in the classroom that can help teachers foster engagement and inquiry.

Phonics gets more attention in elementary English/language arts classrooms than other core foundational reading skills, like fluency. More generally, states’ new reading laws (opens in a new window) emphasizing foundational reading skills seem to have little bearing on how frequently elementary teachers engage in those activities with students. And secondary ELA teachers are spending a considerable chunk of time on these skills, too, possibly pointing to older students’ need to master reading basics. These are some of the key findings from a RAND report released April 30 that analyzed responses from 3,500-plus ELA teachers across the K-12 spectrum.

School Library Journal has proudly partnered with We Are Kid Lit Collective to share and promote the group’s 10th annual summer reading recommendations. In the next couple of weeks, SLJ will publish individual posts featuring their recommendations for picture books, transitional books, middle grade, and young adult titles. 

In pre-pandemic days, it was normal to have a few struggling readers per class. Post-COVID, it has often felt like there are few readers who are not struggling. It was clear that a new approach to literacy instruction was needed — one that leveraged every teacher in our building and gave us ways to catch our older students up on second grade skills without infantilizing the content.

Need suggestions for beach reading or books to bring to summer camp? Each of our lists — for all age ranges and including fiction, nonfiction, folklore, and poetry — includes thirteen selections (a baker’s dozen!), all published 2023–2024 and ideal for the season. Grade levels are only suggestions; the individual child is the real criterion.

Improving literacy doesn’t just happen inside the classroom. School librarians across New Jersey say they play an important role in fostering a love of reading and turning students into lifelong learners. But their role in promoting and teaching literacy in schools is misunderstood and often not acknowledged, they say.

Author Kate Messner describes the story behind The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class, a new multi-author series about all the kids in one elementary school classroom. She writes, “How would we make sure characters’ personalities and voices were consistent from book to book? Would authors be writing the same scenes from varied points of view, or would they be assigned different months of the school year to explore? There was a lot to figure out.”

Just as peak field trip season was set to get underway in the spring of 2020, the pandemic hit. Schools, and the cultural institutions and countless other organizations that normally welcome K-12 students for experiential learning, closed their doors. A few years later, several factors may still be keeping schools from venturing back to in-person field trips, but a growing body of research, advocacy from some district-level officials, and anecdotes from students provide compelling reasons for bringing back in-person field trips.

Getting kids to identify and classify the types of mistakes they make gives them the tools they need to drive their own learning.

As the nation’s English-learner population grows each year, more researchers and policymakers are discussing how to best support these students linguistically and academically. Much of that discussion revolves around available resources for these students, including the only federal funding stream designated for this population: Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, specifically Title III’s state formula grants.

George Takei was just 4 years old when when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the government to forcibly remove approximately 125,000 people from their homes and relocate them to prison camps around the country. Star Trek actor George Takei has written about this time in his life before — once in an autobiography, then in a graphic memoir, and now in his new children’s book, My Lost Freedom.

The landscape of child care assistance is about to change — and costs are finally coming down. At the end of February, President Joe Biden’s administration announced it was going to require every state to cap its co-payments so that families that receive subsidies pay no more than 7 percent of their income towards child care.

This school has identified core instructional practices and conducts regular walk-throughs for teachers to observe their peers’ lessons — then designs targeted professional development so every classroom can get aligned.

Parents of Tennessee fourth graders would have input on whether their children get held back because of low reading test scores, under compromise legislation that’s headed to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk. The legislation also provides additional tutoring to students who advance to the fifth grade, even if they didn’t test as proficient readers or show adequate improvement in grades three and four.

Mother’s Day is coming up and there is no shortage of new board and picture books to share with young readers leading up to the holiday. Across this selection, the maternal figures featured illustrate the special bond between a mother and child. Enjoy these titles to celebrate moms of all kinds on Mother’s Day and throughout the year.

Many educators saw a kid who was too hard and whom they could not support. But my son is so much more than his non-verbal autism diagnosis.

Zadia Gadsden, who leads Takoma Park Elementary School in Takoma Park, Md., is The Washington Post’s 2024 Principal of the Year.

Knowing their work will be shown to a public audience is a powerful and positive motivation for students to produce great work.

Discussing her latest novel Tree. Table. Book. with SLJ, Lois Lowry explains how, from her first book to The Giver to now, she has always been intrigued with the concept of the gifts that age and youth can give to one another. 

Investments that California and other states have made in public preschool have helped many parents through a child care crisis, in which quality options for early learners are often scarce and unaffordable. But many parents say the programs don’t work for their families. Even when Pre–K lasts the whole school day, working parents struggle to find child care before 9 a.m. and after 3 p.m.