Today’s Literacy Headlines

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.

From imaginative play to storytelling, certain activities help build self-regulation, memory, and planning skills—setting the littlest learners on a pathway to academic success.

I use the term Parachute Writings (PWs) to describe quick writing opportunities that can be easily deployed in the classroom. PWs can be dropped into just about any lesson and require limited up front preparation. Just like parachutes prevent skydivers from crashing into the ground, PWs offer an element of safety for students. They are quick, low stakes, and flexible, which provides students the opportunity to practice multiple writing skills for a variety of purposes and audiences in short bursts.

At a time when diverse books are facing challenges across the country, the Ezra Jack Keats (EJK) Foundation presents a new documentary chronicling the diversity in children’s literature. Tell Me Another Story describes the dedication and work of kid lit legends past and present who have brought authenticity and diversity to children’s books. The film highlights creators, advocates, and librarians from W.E.B. Du Bois, Augusta Baker, Pura Belpré, and Ezra Jack Keats, to Pat Cummings, Marley Dias, Grace Lin, Christopher Myers, and Andrea Davis Pinkney. It also looks at the contributions made by the children’s book awards that honor BIPOC creators and their stories, including the Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpré, and Ezra Jack Keats Awards.

Almost 350 people wrote in to share beloved books, and I loved reading through your suggestions. There were so many books I remembered from my own childhood and from reading to my little cousins. Readers wrote in with plenty of classics — “Charlotte’s Web,” the “Magic Tree House” series, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” — that should be part of every reading list. But we also were amazed at the range of titles, with gems for every age group.

Thirteen-year-olds saw unprecedented declines in both reading and math between 2012 and 2020, according to scores released this morning from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Consistent with several years of previous data, the results point to a clear and widening cleavage between America’s highest- and lowest-performing students and raise urgent questions about how to reverse prolonged academic stagnation. The scores offer more discouraging evidence from NAEP, often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card.”

His 200 books, among them “Hatchet” and “Dogsong,” inspired generations with their tales of exploration, survival and the bloody reality of the natural world.

Early Edge California and American Institutes for Research (AIR) released the Multilingual Learning Toolkit last month, an online hub of research-and evidence-based instructional resources and strategies on how to best-support multilingual learners (MLs), a broad term used to encompass both dual language learners (DLLs) and ELs, in grades PreK–3. This one-stop-shop is the product of a collaborative effort between local and national practitioners, researchers, and advocates committed to improving educational opportunities for MLs in early grades where a higher percentage of children are identified as ELs compared to upper grades.

Nearly all librarians, school and public, consider EDI/DEI in collection development, according to SLJ’s recent survey. Leadership however, drew criticism for paying lip service to these efforts or, in some cases, bending to patron pressure, without real support for diversity, equity, or inclusion.

Increasing “wait time,” offering students more choice, and differentiating instruction in simple ways are a few manageable changes.

Childhood is all about imagination, but imagination is a two-way street. On the one hand, it can manufacture our deepest fears. On the other, it can grant us the skill set we need to confront our insecurities — including fear. It’s not so much that children long to be frightened as that they yearn to confront what’s frightening, if only to develop the skills to cope. Here we have four current works in which authors draw in young readers with ghosts, ghouls and vampires — not to scare them but to amuse them.

As states have crafted plans for addressing the academic disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, one area has emerged as a policy priority: early reading instruction. At least 18 states and the District of Columbia have said that they plan to use COVID-19 relief funding through the American Rescue Plan or previous aid packages to support teacher training or instruction in evidence-based approaches to early literacy. And over the past year, four states have passed new laws or enacted regulations that mandate teachers be taught, and use, techniques that are grounded in the large body of research on how children learn to read.

A slow but significant change has been taking place in the early reading world over the past year, loosening the grip that some long-used, but unproven, instructional techniques have held over the field for decades. Big names—like Lucy Calkins, of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and author and literacy specialist Jennifer Serravallo—have recently released updates to their published materials or announced impending rewrites that change how they instruct students to decipher words. Reading researchers say they find these industry moves encouraging … [but] cautioned that this narrow change in materials won’t necessarily lead to large shifts in instructional practice, and that more needs to be done to support teachers of the youngest learners in developing kids’ early reading skills—especially after several years of disrupted, pandemic-era schooling.

School districts don’t have to offer virtual learning this year, and most have scaled back their virtual offerings to encourage students to return to in-person school. But where virtual school is available, some students with disabilities are finding it’s closed to them — or they are being asked to give up certain kinds of support to enroll. That’s left families, advocates, lawyers, and school districts disagreeing on a key question: With schools open nationwide, what exactly must districts provide online?

The perfect children’s section in a public library encourages curiosity and exudes comfort by combining enthusiastic staff and a just-right collection with art, technology, play, and whimsical-but-functional furniture. It is escape and destination. Now, imagine an entire branch. Welcome to the Reby Cary Youth Library in Fort Worth, TX.

Project-based learning is an educational philosophy that calls upon students to take on a real-world question – such as how to best design a farm – and explore it over a period of weeks. Teachers incorporate grade-level instruction into the project, which is designed to meet academic goals and standards, and students learn content and skills while working collaboratively, thinking critically and often revising their work. At the end, that work is shared publicly. Experts say the real-world approach to learning resonates, and studies show it is effective.

Gary Paulsen, whose books taught generations of kids how to survive in the woods with only a hatchet, died Wednesday at the age of 82. Paulsen was best known for those wilderness survival stories, though he wrote more than 200 books during his lifetime, and three of his novels, Hatchet, Dogsong and The Winter Room, were Newbery Honor books.

Experts and educators have many suggestions to help children understand what they read. Learn more about improving oral language and vocabulary, understanding context, reciprocal teaching, and other strategies to build comprehension.

While librarians cannot take on or solve all the issues involving poverty and economic hardship, we can create policies that, at best, help vulnerable students access materials and their school environment; and, at the least, do not shame them. So what are school library programs and other school-wide initiatives doing to buffer the effects of poverty and economic hardship? Here is a list of original ideas and crowdsourced information from colleagues and librarians across the nation.