Today’s Literacy Headlines

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.

Debates over how to teach math echo the conflicts over reading instruction, and some issues are similar. But unlike math, reading—in its full sense—draws on everything a person has been able to learn. “Experts say it’s time for districts to turn their attention to math instruction,” Holly Korbey writes in a recent article for Ed Post, adding that in math, as in reading, student achievement is low, teachers have received inadequate training, and philosophical battles are raging.

NPR Poet in Residence [and children’s author] Kwame Alexander recently challenged listeners to write a poem about napping, or anything related, sleeping, dreaming, relaxing…. One thing we confirmed, hundreds of you spend a lot of time thinking about rest and relaxation. From school kids to the elderly, we received over 1200 poems from across the country. Here’s Alexander’s latest community crowd-sourced poem. It’s called a Blanket of Words.

The overwhelming majority of vision-impaired children attend regular public schools, rather than specialty schools for the blind, and few have teachers who are trained to understand differences between tactile and visual language, experts say. That can be problematic because understanding these different language modes can be critical for teachers to boost literacy skills for their visually impaired students. Researchers have found that differences in the way words are broken up in braille and print can lead to misunderstandings for visually impaired students taught by sighted teachers. For example, braille contracts “ER” into a single cell which represents those two letters. In a word like “runner,” where the “-er” is a suffix, this contraction doesn’t change how a student with regular or low vision would naturally break up the word.

Central Falls, where nearly half of students are English learners, offers 2 extra hours of language instruction daily. That adds up to roughly 50 days. With the infusion of COVID funds, leaders recognized the unique opportunity to uplift the school system. They crunched academic data to identify what student investments might deliver the highest impact. About 600 multilingual learners, they found, remained below the minimum English proficiency level to succeed in English-only classes, and many had languished there for years. Boosting these long-neglected students could address a “root cause” of the district’s years of underperformance, Superintendent Stephanie Toledo believed.

One question I have gotten repeatedly in 20 years of supporting children’s librarians is how to divide up story time age groups. Is it best to have programs dedicated to specific ages to focus on the developmental needs of each? Does a mix of ages offer other ­benefits? Youth services staff at libraries across the ­country make compelling cases for both approaches.

America is finally acknowledging a harsh truth: The way many schools teach children to read doesn’t work. Educators, and indeed families, are having a long overdue conversation about how one of the nation’s most widely used curricula, “Units of Study,” is deeply flawed — and where to go from here. “Many administrators have also assumed that instructional programs peddled to their districts have a solid research base and are supported by data. We lead school systems in different regions of the country—the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest and Texas. And we’ve all seen the instructional disconnect,” say three superintendents.

Guiding upper elementary students with boundaries rather than rules can make for a more harmonious classroom. Boundaries change with what we need—maybe today we need to stay quiet as a class because there’s something everyone really needs to focus on. Or maybe today we need to work on group work; therefore, our noise level is appropriately louder—but still respecting the work of other groups and other classrooms near us. Whatever the case may be, our boundaries are set around our two classroom values—safety and personal bests.

How do you know you really know something? That’s part of what cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham explains in his new book, “How to Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy,” and the focus of the excerpt below. Willingham is a renowned psychology professor at the University of Virginia who focuses his research on the application of cognitive psychology to K-12 schools and higher education. Here’s an excerpt from “How to Outsmart Your Brain.”

Education researchers have been urging schools to invest their $120 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds in tutoring. What researchers have in mind is an extremely intensive type of tutoring, often called “high dosage” tutoring, which takes place daily or almost every day. It has produced remarkable results for students in almost 100 studies, but these programs are difficult for schools to launch and operate. They involve hiring and training tutors and coming up with tailored lesson plans for each child.

To support multilingual learners of English (MLEs), The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), TESOL International Association, and WIDA have made the following recommendations for and comments on the 2030 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) Writing Assessment Framework. Recommendations include: secure resources to review assessments written in multiple languages; treat multilingual learners and students with disabilities independently as they represent distinctly different groups of students; and incorporate opportunities for multilingual learners to access and utilize their rich linguistic and cultural resources during assessment.

People that have been perceived as being in opposite corners over how to teach reading in California released a joint paper Thursday agreeing that foundational reading skills like phonics, vocabulary and comprehension should be taught explicitly and systematically to all students. And children who are learning English as a second language, who make up 1 in 4 first graders in California, also need lessons to practice speaking and listening in English, and to make connections with other languages they know. In addition, they agreed that all children should be screened early to identify both needs and strengths in reading, taking into account students’ level of English language proficiency and the language in which they have been taught.

When families are deeply involved in their children’s learning, student academic success often follows. But what does that look like in action? Research has consistently shown that home-school partnerships lead to higher grades, test scores, attendance and graduation rates, said Karen Mapp, a senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Mapp spoke Tuesday during the U.S. Department of Education’s first online panel discussion in its Family Engagement Learning Series.

If school districts want a broader, more diverse group of parents to attend meetings, ask questions, and participate in school-based activities, they can’t just invite families to show up—they need to set up systems that make them feel welcome and heard. That was one of the takeaways from a panel on Latino parent engagement March 8 at SXSW EDU. On the panel, “Elevating Latino Parents in Education,” parents, advocates, and educators discussed efforts in the Houston area to make home-school communication smoother, and equip families with the knowledge and skills to advocate for their kids.

The transition into kindergarten has always been a big one for kids. And as this first year of elementary school has become increasingly academic, some parents wonder whether it’s best to enroll children as soon as they’re eligible, or wait an additional year until they’re more mature. Considerations may feel especially fraught now, as fewer kids attended preschool during the pandemic. Experts say that delaying kindergarten – a practice known as “redshirting” – may benefit kids in certain circumstances, but caution that there are also disadvantages to waiting.

The airport at the center of “You Are Here: Connecting Flights,” a collection of 12 cleverly linked stories by Asian American authors, happens to be in Chicago. But its mushrooming chaos, due to weather delays and last-minute cancellations, is a familiar joy of most major travel hubs. Here, it’s the Saturday before the Fourth of July, a summer storm has wreaked havoc on flight schedules, and many of the book’s young Asian protagonists, who all seem to be around 12, are enduring run-ins with extremely jerky strangers.

Speed booking is a fun, high-energy method for students to get book recommendations and practice their summarizing skills. It offers movement, connection, and a creative outlet. It can also be adapted in innovative ways through student-generated questions, character role-playing, poetry analysis, and research reporting to encourage higher-level thinking.

American author Laurie Halse Anderson is the winner of the 2023 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest children’s book prize, with the laureate receiving five million Swedish krona. The award was announced live from Stockholm on March 7, and was broadcast simultaneously at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. The ALMA jury’s citation states, “In her tightly written novels for young adults, Laurie Halse Anderson gives voice to the search for meaning, identity, and truth, both in the present and the past. …”

Only about a quarter of the 100 most-used ed-tech tools in classrooms meet Every Student Succeeds Act requirements, according to a new report from LearnPlatform, an education technology company that helps districts measure the use and effectiveness of their digital products. When the pandemic hit, many companies provided their products to schools and teachers for free. And schools used them even if companies didn’t provide evidence of standards alignment, because educators needed something that would help engage their students.

“One of the things we consistently see in pediatrics is that children of color get less of everything,” said Katharine Zuckerman, an associate professor of pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University who has studied racial disparities in diagnoses of autism and other disorders. “They get less antibiotics. They get less early intervention.” A growing number of parents, researchers and politicians have in recent years turned their attention to these persistent gaps, which they argue play a pivotal — and long-overlooked — role in shaping educational inequities years, even decades, after children start school.

As a newly minted middle school English teacher, I was shocked by the number of students who entered my classroom unable to decode text. As I got to know them, I saw that herculean efforts to mask their reading disabilities revealed intelligence, determination, and traumatic relationships to school. In my experience, conversations about the science of reading are happening primarily with elementary and early childhood educators. But how are we addressing the ways that the system has failed our secondary students when they first learned to read? How can I, a middle school ELA teacher, support the students in my class who were passed along without receiving the literacy instruction they needed?

March is dedicated to celebrating women’s contributions to history, culture, and society in the U.S. But all around the globe, women are working for a more just and accepting world. These 10 collective biographies of hardworking, determined, fierce women will teach and inspire young readers.

The pandemic has taken an enormous academic toll on the nation’s students, especially those in high-poverty schools. In response, states and districts are pursuing a range of interventions, from intensive tutoring to summer learning opportunities. But ensuring that students’ daily classroom instruction is built on high-quality, standards-based instructional materials and teaching techniques should be a core component of the work.

Sharie Murray noticed the benefits of getting kids moving during the pandemic. The K-3 special education teacher and her colleagues at North Elementary School in Birch Run, Mich., started to use short exercise videos to keep students occupied during waiting times over Zoom, but Murray said getting students’ blood moving also helped them focus more during the virtual class periods.

In a survey of 21 school districts in rural, suburban and urban areas, NPR found most districts – from New York City to Austin, Texas, to Lawrence, Kan. – still had heightened levels of chronic absenteeism. Students who are chronically absent are at higher risk of falling behind, scoring lower on standardized tests and even dropping out. And as often happens in education, students who struggle with attendance are also more likely to live in poverty, be children of color or have disabilities.

The “three-cueing” approach has come under fire, but actually ridding classrooms of the lessons may prove challenging, purchase orders reveal. In some cases, district officials stood by the literacy materials, saying their teachers swear by them. Others defended their purchases as one tool among many at educators’ disposal for teaching kids how to read, acknowledging that they were insufficient on their own.

The pandemic led to a rapid rise in screen time among kids while the vast majority of them engaged in full-time remote or hybrid learning. But as COVID-19 restrictions lifted and students returned to in-person instruction, the time they spent in front of screens didn’t come back down as expected, according to newly released research supported by the National Institutes of Health and published in the journal Pediatrics. Those elevated levels of screen time persisted for more than one year after the pandemic forced mass school building closures nationwide. That’s troubling to health experts for a number of reasons: Too much screen time is bad for children both physically and mentally. It can lead to weight-gaining habits and eventually obesity and hurt students’ focus and executive skills—all of which can get in the way of learning.

There are lots of reasons why screening isn’t the magic bullet that necessarily leads to “fixing” dyslexic students’ struggles with reading. Literacy experts and advocates for children with dyslexia explain some of the multiple factors that can impede both the screening process and what happens next.

Tonya Bolden is one of the most prolific and acclaimed authors of children’s and young adult literature that focuses on Black history. We thought it was fitting to conclude our Black History Month nonfiction/fiction pairings by highlighting a selection of her works for young people. The offerings are organized in chronological order, from enslavement to modern-day.

Many students and teachers view math as a subject for numbers and computation, instead of one that benefits from discussion and interpretation. Based on our experience as children’s literature and mathematics teacher-educators, we’ve found that providing the context to mathematical problems through literature supports students’ learning—children’s books can be used to integrate math and literacy and to provide context for math.