Today’s Literacy Headlines

Monear Fatemi was on the hunt for a children’s book she had loved as a kid in the 1980s. She remembered so many vivid details: the family in the book ate lima beans, the dad had a bushy mustache, the cat’s name was “Dog.” She could recall every detail, it seemed, except the title and author. Fatemi, a former English teacher, says she was eager to find this particular title for her 2-year-old daughter because it had meant so much to her when she was growing up. Fatemi is half Persian, and says she rarely saw people of color represented in books or television at the time.

“The Polar Express” was born in Providence, written by longtime New England resident Chris Van Allsburg. Since its publication in 1985, kids have experienced the magic of this Caldecott-winning modern classic. From his early days as a sculptor to his success as a children’s book author and illustrator, the Rhode Island School of Design alum shares his own story.

Our most widely circulated education coverage this year focused largely on how school is still looking a whole lot different today than it did two years ago, how educators and policymakers are both recognizing the need for urgent learning recovery efforts, and how emerging political fights over schools and curriculum are straining an already stretched system. These were our 21 most shared and debated articles of 2021.

We lost so many beloved children’s book authors and illustrators this year, including Beverly Cleary (104 years old), Jerry Pinkney, Eloise Greenfield, Mitsumasa Anno, Lois Ehlert, George Ancona, and Norton Juster. Here’s a brief remembrance of these book creators who touched so many children’s lives.

Providing fun, engaging activities and welcoming settings for instruction can boost happiness in classrooms — and learning. Across the country, educators are infusing joy and happiness into learning. It’s a strategy that has been recommended — and executed — for many decades, but one teachers and administrators say has become more deliberate and purposeful since COVID-19 disrupted in-person learning and created economic, emotional and physical hardships for communities and families.

Teaching in 2021 brought continued challenges and stressors as teachers navigated the second year of the pandemic. In the first half of the year, many schools were still at least partially remote, leaving teachers to juggle simultaneously teaching students who were at home and at school. Then, as nearly all schools opened for full in-person instruction this fall, teachers suddenly had to confront a host of new challenges, including staffing shortages, student mental health issues, and lost learning time.

Author and illustrator Sandra Boynton has had a long and prolific career, with over 70 million books, primarily for children, sold since her first, Hippos Go Berserk!, was published in 1977, written as part of a project while she was a student at Yale School of Drama. Boynton has since gone on to pen everything from the nonfiction Chocolate: The Consuming Passion to recent release Woodland Dance!, published this past September.

As California expands transitional kindergarten, English learner advocates are urging school districts to prioritize children learning English as a second language. California is expanding transitional kindergarten, or TK, over four years, to eventually offer all 4-year-olds a free year of preschool before kindergarten. Advocates say the expansion of TK is an opportunity to offer high-quality preschool to more children who speak a language other than English at home — about 60% of young children in California, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

LeVar Burton has been hired as host of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, giving the competition a celebrity headliner who’s also a longtime literacy advocate as Scripps takes over production of the bee telecast. Burton, who was the longtime host of the children’s educational program “Reading Rainbow,” said yes immediately when approached about the hosting role. Burton comes from a family of educators and said the bee represents “the inspirational, aspirational ideal of education.”

In a school year that was supposed to be a return to normal but has proven anything but, Michigan’s Van Buren Intermediate School District has launched an educational program based on a key component of modern psychology — cognitive behavior therapy. Principles of this method are embedded in the curriculum and are part of the district’s full embrace of social and emotional learning.

Marguerite Higgins faced off with armed Nazi soldiers at the Dachau concentration camp, stared down Gen. Douglas MacArthur and went behind enemy lines all to get a story. Higgins may not be a household name, but she was a trailblazing war correspondent before women were a prescence on the battlefield. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Higgins died well before the Internet age, but her story is being told in Nathan Hale’s new graphic novel, “Cold War Correspondent.”

Teachers continue to be trained in ways that ignore the findings of cognitive science. One practical implication of cognitive load theory is that you can’t teach students critical thinking in the abstract; you can think critically about a topic only if you have ample information about it stored in long-term memory. It’s also important to provide students with “retrieval practice”: having them recall information from long-term memory to make it more readily available, perhaps by giving frequent quizzes. Students should have some freedom of choice, but if the curriculum is guided by their individual interests, they likely won’t acquire the information needed to gain new knowledge later on. .

Fewer young Denver students were reading at grade level this fall than in the previous two years — a concerning trend district officials attribute to unfinished learning during the pandemic. The district is rolling out several strategies to reverse the trend, including tutoring students who need extra help, expanding summer literacy programming, and adopting a new state-approved curriculum based on the “science of reading,” officials said. Some schools are already piloting the curriculum, called Core Knowledge Language Arts, and teachers said it’s making a big difference.

I support a whole-child approach to teaching, but how do schools integrate it when we have so many different subjects to cover? Stop teaching in “bins.” Math is from 10 a.m. to 10:45 a.m., followed by reading until 11:50, then off to recess to build social-emotional skills. We often break the whole child into fragments to receive piecemeal instruction in individual subjects. Even though the science of learning indicates that teaching in bins is not optimal, the practice has remained a mainstay for decades. Take the bins we absolutely believe in—the divide between reading and math.

The troubling enrollment losses that school districts reported last year have in many places continued this fall, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt public education across the country, an NPR investigation has found. We compiled the latest headcount data directly from more than 600 districts in 23 states and Washington, D.C., including statewide data from Massachusetts, Georgia and Alabama. We found that very few districts, especially larger ones, have returned to pre-pandemic numbers. Most are now posting a second straight year of declines. This is particularly true in some of the nation’s largest systems.

I remember, not too fondly, one writing assignment I gave my students in which I asked them to write about the most disgusting thing that happened to them. It led to giggles and students were paying attention that day. But were they learning much to support their success in school and beyond? Not really. I’ve since come to understand that good writing instruction should integrate reading and writing, connecting writing assignments to great books, articles, and texts students are assigned to read.

The picture books of 2021 have been beautiful, funny, emotional, and important — sometimes all within the same book. From informational nonfiction picture books about Black and Native American history to books about accepting our emotions, celebrating our family heritage, or just being silly, this year’s picture books have been amazing. So when you are picking out books to give as holiday gifts or bringing home something to read from the library, I hope you’ll consider supporting 2021 picture books.

Of the five senses, the ability to sense sound is “undervalued and underappreciated,” and yet inextricably tied to our understanding of the world, says neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “We live in a visually-oriented world,” says Kraus. Visual objects have “ingredients” such as size, texture and color. “So does sound. Sound is invisible but consists of so much information: pitch, timing, rhythm, timbre and phrase.” Kraus’s new book, “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World,” is her love letter to sound. Drawing on decades of research from her Brainvolts auditory neuroscience laboratory, she offers compelling insights for parents and teachers as they think about children’s sonic environment – and how everything from background noise to music lessons can influence brain development.

“Teaching reading is rocket science,” Louisa Moats is well known for saying. It is something we frequently referenced during our guided reading professional development for teachers. Sadly, until we started on our Science of Reading journey two-plus years ago, we had no idea how bereft our instruction was of the benefits of that science. Our collective awakening started as a result of listening to Emily Hanford’s podcast, “At a Loss for Words,” in which Hanford reveals that reading instruction in America has led children to read poorly based on a flawed theory of the mechanics of reading. While the three of us had different emotional reactions to hearing it, our powerful common experience was, “We have to do something!”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has struggled with dyslexia since elementary school. Now he’s telling his story through Ben, the baseball-loving protagonist of his new children’s book who has a tough time reading, too. “Ben & Emma’s Big Hit” parallels Newsom’s experience with dyslexia, which he learned he had in fifth grade. The 54-year-old governor said parenting his own children, who also have learning issues, inspired him to work with Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, after noticing a lack of picture books designed for young dyslexic children learning to read.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, has selected a new president and CEO: Aaliyah A. Samuel, the deputy assistant secretary for local, state, and national engagement for the U.S. Department of Education. Samuel is taking the wheel at a time when there is an unprecedented surge of interest in social-emotional learning among educators and policymakers brought on by the pandemic and the trauma and disruptions it has caused for schoolchildren. But the spotlight also brings challenges—in particular whether the social-emotional learning field can deliver on the research that shows SEL can boost student academics and well-being. Samuel spoke with Education Week about the challenges and opportunities facing social emotional learning at this unique time.

No stranger to the spotlight, Marc Brown’s Arthur is having a particularly luminous moment in the sun. The affable aardvark’s eponymous book series from Little, Brown is celebrating 45 years in print this year, and PBS and WGBH-TV in Boston will air the 25th and final season of its animated Arthur series in spring 2022. In celebration of these milestones, and to share some nuggets of wisdom and wit that Arthur and his pals have dispensed over the decades, Brown has compiled Believe in Yourself: What We Learned from Arthur, due out on January 25.

Since 2008 the Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL) model, which started out in three elementary schools and feeder schools and now reaches 50,000 students in over a hundred preschool and elementary classrooms, has been working to address these gaps by providing a research-based approach to meeting English learners’(ELs) linguistic and academic needs by capitalizing on their assets. The model is grounded in four pillars that prioritize weaving both expressive and academic language into curricula, creating an affirming and enriching environment, aligning early education and elementary school systems, and building strong partnerships between families and schools. SEAL also focuses on professional development, curriculum support, and technical assistance to improve school systems.

School’s a little different this year, so art teachers are using their classes to help kids cope. After spending months trying to get used to remote learning, now kids are struggling to adjust to being in school in person again. Health experts recently declared the decline in children and adolescents’ mental health a “national emergency.” As schools grapple with the social and emotional effects of the pandemic on students, music, theater and other art teachers are trying to help.

Every Child a Reader, the charitable arm of the Children’s Book Council, has revealed the winners of its Kids’ Book Choice Awards. Launched in 2008 by the Children’s Book Council and Every Child a Reader, these are the only national book awards selected exclusively by young readers.

“The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats, has long been a favorite, celebrated as one of the first mainstream children’s books to prominently feature a Black protagonist. This adaptation aims to help change perceptions about Black identity and attract new audiences to opera at a time when the art form faces serious financial pressures and questions about its future. “We are waking up to the idea that opera is for everyone,” said Andrea Davis Pinkney, a children’s book author who wrote the libretto. “We are waking up to the fact that, yes, this is your story, and your story, and my story, and our story.”

On Dream Street, anything is possible. “We really wanted to write a book where children could see themselves in it, as well as know that their dreams are important,” says author Tricia Elam Walker. “So this is a place where creativity abounds, and imagination and dreams are celebrated.” Dream Street was illustrated by Ekua Holmes. She and Elam Walker are cousins who grew up together in Roxbury, Mass. They based their first book together on their childhood neighborhood — a beautiful place full of parks, trees and gardens, full of all different kinds of houses, old and new.

We know that high-quality, systemic SEL can help students identify emotions from social cues, set goals, consider multiple perspectives, and problem solve. We also know that SEL can reduce bullying and school suspensions and improve academic performance and school climate. But what research hasn’t yet established is how—or even whether—universal school-based SEL programs serve students with disabilities and students of color, who are among the most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the evidence for SEL’s impact on racially- and ability-marginalized youth is murky at best and nonexistent at worst because we haven’t looked deeply enough. And that’s a big problem.

I spent much of the past year sharing a short draft of policy recommendations with more than 100 folks who know and care about English learners’ success — educators, researchers and advocates — to collect feedback and develop a slate of concrete reforms to significantly improve how the country and its schools serve these students. The result, A New Federal Equity Agenda for Dual Language Learners and English Learners, was published at The Century Foundation today. It provides a much-needed starting point for overhauling the Every Student Succeeds Act and other federal policies governing English learners’ education.

When the questioning process engages all students, it’s magical. The room is alive and full of energy. There’s active thinking taking place and a feeling of high expectations and a belief that all students can learn. Here are three ways to engage pre-K to second-grade students in the questioning process.

From hearing lullabies to the sing-song lilt of a parent’s voice, babies form strong connections with their caregivers through sound and song. Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist and author of the book “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World” says “Before babies learn the words, they learn the music,” said Kraus. “Why do we use the intonations and inflections that we do with babies? It’s because they respond to that and they learn.” Music, she notes, does an exceptional job activating our cognitive, motor, reward and sensory networks. And making music changes the brain for the better, said Kraus. “It strengthens your cognitive skills because it relies on memory and focused attention. And it strengthens the kinds of skills that we know are important for reading, for learning and for engaging with other people.”

Setting up project-based learning with young students can be a challenge, but it’s worth the work, according to first-grade teachers from across the U.S.

New study finds higher quality interactions between parents and young children while reading traditional books over digital apps. Parents talked more to their children – with children in turn responding to them more –while reading the print version, according to the study in Pediatrics. Children more prone to emotional outbursts also responded to their parents better when reading from a book.

While the nonfiction of our childhoods was less exciting, the variety in nonfiction these days is amazing. The ease with which we can create graphic- and photo-heavy, well-designed nonfiction means that children are gravitating to nonfiction books like never before. We’ve long assumed that kids have to be convinced that reading is pleasurable, especially when the task is learning about our world instead of a fictional one, like Narnia. Yet, researchers and librarians who have tracked the reading preferences of real, in-the-wild kids would disagree.

Reading Reimagined aims to reduce the reading gap by identifying effective curricula and teaching strategies for students in grades 4-8. Foundational and comprehension skills will be the focus of the research and development project, as will students’ self-efficacy and personal connections to literacy. The project aims to provide research-based curriculum and tools to help underserved students become successful readers.

Fewer than one in five Chicago third graders met or exceeded state standards in reading and math on a standardized exam given in the spring — when a majority of students were doing most of their learning at home. That’s compared to citywide proficiency rates closer to 40% in third grade reading and 33% in third grade math in 2019, underscoring the impact of COVID-19 on young learners in the nation’s third largest school district.

Identifying different layers of identity is particularly helpful for students transitioning into a new social and cultural context.

From a little suitcase that contains a towering cake to the ultimate shaggy dog story.

The most notable picture, middle grade and young adult books of the year, selected by The Times’s children’s books editor.

Tahlequah Public Schools recently received the Innovative Approaches to Literacy grant from the U.S. Department of Education, and the money will be distributed at all of its sites over the next four years. The grant is worth over $3 million, and the purpose is to enhance literacy among TPS students. The grant will allow the district to add literacy teachers, staff, media coordinators, and library offerings. With the money, students will also be able to take home two free books. “We are going to work with Cherokee Nation and Northeastern Health System to provide additional free books when they go to child wellness visits,” said Natalie Cloud, grants coordinator at TPS.

When I had my first child, the advice to me about how to raise a strong reader was simple: Read to her all the time and leave good books around. That guidance reflected the belief that learning to read was instinctual, much in the way that the acquisition of language is. But a deepening canon of brain research — dubbed the science of reading — has led to a concerted effort now to change how we teach reading. “Kids learn language just by being in an environment where language is spoken. Reading does not develop that way, a real critical distinction,” said reading expert Ryan Lee-James, director of the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School. “In fact, those language areas of the brain have to be reorganized or programmed for children to be able to read.”

It can be difficult for immigrants in the U.S. who don’t speak English to support their children’s education. “It feels like immigrant parents are deliberately excluded and pushed to the margins,” said one mother regarding inadequate translation services. Philadelphia parents told The Associated Press about students being used as translators despite federal prohibitions, incorrect telephone translations, and poor communication about bullying. Experts say many other school districts have lagged in creating equitable systems for non-English speakers. Philadelphia school officials said there has been progress, including sending communication in parents’ languages and hiring dozens more in-school interpreters called bilingual cultural assistants.

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.