Today’s Literacy Headlines

If your student or child had to rapidly transition to an at-home learning environment as a struggling reader, an English language learner, or one with dyslexia, there are many ways that the support they were receiving in school can transfer to their home. Creating authentic learning experiences such as having your child help prepare meals, shop, and participate in outings to parks or museums can improve literacy. Simply engaging in conversation in the language spoken at home around shared experiences, explaining your thinking, and asking open-ended questions so your child can share their thoughts, facilitates a deeper level of communication. This builds metacognition, which is key for comprehension and reading success. There are many ways parents and educators can further support their readers, whatever their need. We broke down specific strategies you can use to make learning at home as effective as possible.

Should teachers spend the precious time they have helping students dig deeply into a specific issue, problem, or question? Or should they teach more broadly about a wide variety of topics? The argument for the former approach—called “deep learning”—is that it improves student engagement and prepares kids to be better problem solvers in a world with increasingly complex challenges around health, economics, social justice, and climate change. A broader approach, the counter argument goes, introduces students to a greater mix of topics, giving them a better sense of all the issues and problems society is facing. Taking that “deep learning” approach is now more difficult than ever, as students are stuck at home learning remotely either full time or part time, or in socially distanced classrooms where collaboration, project-based learning, and lab experiments are hard, if not impossible, to do. That doesn’t mean teachers aren’t trying.

Voters around the country supported measures to strengthen ECE. States and localities have significant sway when it comes to designing and funding ECE programs, and these programs were on the ballot in a handful of places. There was already public support for investing more in ECE prior to 2020, but the pandemic has shined a glaring spotlight on our country’s child care crisis and brought urgency to this issue. Much of the action around ECE in this election was at the local level. For example, voters in Multnomah County,OR, which includes Portland, passed Measure 26-214 to create a universal pre-K program for three- and four-year-olds. Voters in San Antonio, TX overwhelmingly voted in favor of Proposition A to expand the city’s Pre-K for SA program, which provides high-quality pre-K in four centers and offers professional development and grants to other pre-K providers.

With remote learning looking like the state of play this fall, publishers have extended permissions for read alouds of their titles. To help educators and librarians engaged in online learning and storytimes held via Zoom and other virtual means, many publishers relaxed copyright restriction on their works at the start of the pandemic. The new Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster policies appear in this article, in addition to updates from Boyds Mills Kane, Enchanted Lion, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Sourcebooks, and TeachingBooks. These are included in SLJ’s full COVID-19 Publisher Information Directory.

Four teachers offer several suggestions for online tools to promote interactive learning, and many others offer readers’ comments about their favorites. Some of the tools discussed are Google slides, Padlet, and Nearpod.

Over the last decade, and certainly since March, when the pandemic shut down our schools, educators have become increasingly aware of the necessity to help students build social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies. In Meriden Public Schools in Connecticut, 77 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-price meals, and the strains of poverty have increased significantly since the pandemic. As educators, we recognize that meeting the needs of the whole child requires us to start early to avoid having disengaged and disenfranchised students in middle and high school. In response, Meriden has created a district-wide SEL program across our eight elementary schools.

In 1988, Katherine Paterson wrote in the Book Review that children need not only the happily-ever-after of fairy tales, but also “proper endings” in which “hope is a yearning, rooted in reality.” She says, “I know children need and deserve the kind of satisfaction they may get only from the old fairy tales. Children need all kinds of stories. Other people will write theirs, and I will write the ones I can. As a writer I have a responsibility always to come humbly and childlike to the empty page — a responsibility always to be ready to be surprised by truth, ready to be taught, even to be changed. It is a joy to write for the young, for most often they will come to my story eager to be surprised, to be taught, to be changed and to give their unique vision to the filling out of my imperfect one. And in this exchange of life and vision, of heart and mind, we come to know that we belong to one another.”

On Election Day, Multnomah County, which includes Portland, Ore., passed one of the most progressive universal preschool policies in the nation. The measure, to be paid for by a large tax on high earners, will provide free preschool for all children ages 3 and 4, in public schools and in existing and new private preschools and home-based child care centers. It will also significantly raise teachers’ wages so they are equivalent to those of kindergarten teachers. It seeks to overcome the central problem in early childhood care and education: It is unaffordable for many families, yet teachers are underpaid. The solution, Multnomah County voters decided, is to finance preschool with public funding instead of private tuition, and to pay teachers much more. It also seeks to overcome some of the pitfalls of universal preschool policies in places like New York and Washington, D.C. In doing so, early childhood researchers say the policy could serve as a blueprint for the rest of the country.

The coronavirus pandemic has allowed a long-standing educational myth to take on new force. Educators often claim that their efforts to serve some groups of children, primarily Black, Latino, and Native American, are hindered by things their families fail to do—things like supervise homework, comply with school requests, and communicate with teachers. During pandemic-initiated distance learning, these family contributions may be even more important than during normal classroom learning and even less possible, given that COVID-19 has hit families in these groups particularly hard. Concerned for their students, many educators fear that the pandemic will exacerbate the “family-disengagement problem.” We take a different view. Family disengagement is not inevitable during the pandemic or at other times. Our team of researchers and practitioners working toward school improvement in the Forest Grove, Ore., district believes that families of every background are ready to partner with schools when schools speak the right cultural language.

Texas has failed to prove it did enough to overhaul a system that illegally left thousands of public school students who have disabilities without needed special education services, according to a letter federal officials sent the state last month. A 2018 federal investigation found the state had been effectively denying students with disabilities the tools and services they need in order to learn, in violation of federal law. After visiting 12 Texas public schools in May 2019, the U.S. Department of Education did not find sufficient evidence Texas had done what was necessary to reach all the students who were previously denied special education services.

Strengthening students’ grasp of language and knowledge takes more than merely learning a weekly list of core words, contended Dr. Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert, author of Scholastic W.O.R.D., in a recent edWebinar sponsored by Scholastic Digital Solutions. The webinar explored a more strategic approach to vocabulary acquisition. Words should be taught in the service of knowledge: Learners build their vocabulary and knowledge through knowledge-centered text. To do this, she advised clustering English language arts reading around informational and narrative texts that share topics. But repeated core vocabulary, with a focus on the 2,500 more frequent morphological families across texts (particularly for beginning and struggling readers), reinforces learners’ grasp of words and their contextual changes. This approach helps students acquire a richer bank of words while developing knowledge. They are also engaged in a deeper level of reading that adds more complex words to their vocabulary.

Growing up disabled, I could not find much representation of experiences like my own. Neurodiverse and mentally ill, I struggled to find positive and uplifting books that showed hopeful outcomes to living with my symptoms and conditions. Fortunately, today’s kid lit doesn’t shy away from disability but embraces it. Now more than ever, disabled younger readers have books that offer better representation of the diverse spectrum of disability. In the best children’s books about disabilities, you’ll find picture books and middle grade novels that showcase unforgettable characters navigating disability and life in an abled world.

A 2019 state law toughened up rules on how Colorado schools teach reading — establishing new training requirements for teachers and placing guardrails on the kind of curriculum schools can use in kindergarten through third grade. But for the average parent, figuring out if schools are using proven approaches to reading instruction and following the new state rules still isn’t easy. That’s why a statewide dyslexia advocacy group, in partnership with a local school improvement consulting firm, created a free online guide that parents and caregivers can use during discussions with teachers, principals or other school staff. The eight-page guide, Colorado Literacy Dialogue Tool for Parents/Caregivers, walks parents through key questions they should ask about reading instruction. In addition to listing words and phrases that indicate a school is using scientifically based materials and strategies, the guide also cites names and phrases that may raise red flags about a school’s approach.

For nearly all of our students in today’s COVID-19 pandemic, book access remains severely restricted or largely digital. Across the United States, teachers, librarians, school leaders, and nonprofits have gone to great lengths to get books into the hands of young readers particularly during this pandemic. We all play a role in the collective work to increase book access; these trying times are bringing out creative solutions. Here are just a few ideas on how to flood students with books, as we muddle our way through a school year unlike any other.

Paul Tough is the author of “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why,” the October selection for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This. The coronavirus pandemic has upended American life. What are its consequences for the education realm, which is already characterized by major inequalities? Tough joins PBS NewsHour to discuss troubling trends in K-12 and higher education.

In this time of virtual and hybrid learning, navigating the intricacies of distance learning can be tricky, especially when it comes to phonics. Research shows that time on task with a teacher has the most impact on reading proficiency. But how do we get the most out of our limited time in front of students? Although reading instruction can be more challenging online, here are some strategies to make it work.

These new works from Tomi Ungerer, Sophie Blackall and Christian Robinson are realistic and — without being soppy — filled with hope.

“I’m not a reader.” It’s a common refrain Julia Torres, a teacher-librarian in Denver Public Schools, has heard throughout her 16-year career. She’s seen students tear up books, throw them away or check them out only to immediately return them all because they didn’t have confidence in their ability to read. As a librarian, Torres feels strongly that libraries should be spaces of liberation, places where students can develop a love of reading at any stage. Reading is a skill that everyone can grow to love, but too many negative experiences during a child’s literacy education can result in trauma that appears as boredom, apathy or even anger. In an American Library Association presentation , Torres and Julie Stivers, a teacher-librarian at Mt. Vernon MS in North Carolina, explored how reading trauma is inflicted on students and what librarians can do to interrupt and prevent that trauma from occurring.

It’s been a challenge to shift kindergarten online, as that particular year of school is a huge leap for young students discovering not only how to actually be in school — and all that entails — but also developing new skills such as learning how to read. But there are steps educators can take to ease the transition, both to school and an online space. Taking a step back from educational pressures, such as learning to read, also may help if that’s a possibility. If reading is a goal, creating smaller groups to work on phonics is one way to help focus students, and spelling practices where young children write a word and hold it up to the camera may encourage active involvement.

Can teachers really convey things like the importance of cooperation and how to resolve conflict when students only see their friends in tiny boxes through Google Meet or Zoom? What about the intense work that’s required to teach a 5-year-old child how to decode words? And then there’s the children, who aren’t really built for it. “Kindergartners usually need a lot of movement and exploration, and these are things that you can’t really do remotely, especially having to sit and stare at a screen,” said Lily Kang, a kindergarten teacher in the Boston area who’s teaching her students online this year. Not far away, Catherine Snow, a professor of education at Harvard, agreed: “The biggest worries about missing in-person kindergarten are about socio-emotional development, learning to work in groups, and things like that,” she said. Having a parent or guardian to assist kindergarten children with online learning makes a big difference.

Listening to students read aloud is an essential practice for any primary-grade teacher. It is no less essential than a swimming coach watching children swim or a piano teacher listening to a child play. Listening to students read aloud provides an important opportunity for the teacher to coach or prompt students when they are stuck on a word or when they encounter other problems when reading. Listening to students read aloud is also a potential tool for formative assessment. That is, it can provide information to inform next steps in instruction. For example, we might ascertain from listening to students read aloud that they are successfully decoding most consonant-vowel-consonant words (e.g., rip) but not consonant-vowel-consonant-e words (e.g., ripe), or that they don’t attend to the captions when reading an informational text.

Paul Tough, author of the PBS NewsHour October pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why.”

Rebecca Palacios, a National Teachers Hall of Fame inductee on why getting parents and guardians involved in their kids’ earliest school experiences has always been key. When parents and caregivers get involved in their preschool-age kids’ learning, research shows, it’s the number one predictor of early literacy success and academic achievement in later grades. “One of the biggest mistakes I made in my career, early on, was not involving the families in my work,” said Palacios.

Seeking ways to teach safely during the pandemic, schools across the United States have embraced the idea of classes in the open air, as Americans did during disease outbreaks a century ago. The efforts to throw tents over playgrounds and arrange desks in parks and parking lots have brought new life to an outdoor education movement, inspired in part by Scandinavian “forest schools” where children bundle up against frigid temperatures for long romps in the snow. Here is a look at four American schools where students are learning in the open air, and where at least some parents and teachers hope that the temporary measures might become permanent, for as long as the weather cooperates.

Approximately 3.7 million 5-year-olds were expected to enroll in kindergarten this fall. In pandemic times, most of them — 62 percent by one estimate — were slated to start the school year sitting at home in front of a computer. Asked what 5-year-olds stand to lose if their entire kindergarten experience is moved online, Laura Bornfreund, the director of early and elementary education policy at New America, was concise: “All of it.” And children who already have the least stand to lose the most. Research has shown that high-quality early education benefits children, especially children from low-income families, through to their adulthood. A strong start can improve academic achievement, financial independence, even heart health. For the most vulnerable students, missing kindergarten could become a permanent handicap.

A new report by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) stresses that states should play a “coordinating role for their school districts and ensure that they have the capacity, pedagogical support, and resources to address the needs of ELs.” Drawing from the report’s insights, here are three areas where state leaders can do more to support ELs today and lay the foundation for more equitable systems in the future: ensure that ELs receive equitable access to federal, state, and local funding; coordinate resources and guidance to support EL instruction in all learning settings.; and share guidance and tools related to EL entry, exit, and assessment procedures.

It’s important to remember that students develop socially and emotionally at the same time as they develop academically. That’s why it’s crucial to integrate SEL skills into the daily instruction you’re offering to your students. A classroom where good decisions are consistently being made, and where students learn the value of self-control along with the true impact their actions and words can have on others, will be a positive learning community for all, even during a pandemic. How will you ensure your students are learning and growing socially, emotionally, and academically during virtual learning? Here are a few easy ways to maintain SEL skills in the virtual elementary classroom this school year–when children need this focus more than ever.

In July, Slate sat down with four teachers for a candid conversation about their hopes and fears for the coming school year. “I’m scared,” one said. “The opportunity gap is just going to widen,” said another. And they all agreed: “When a kid or a teacher dies, everything is going to change.” We’re now halfway through the fall semester—time for a midterm check-in. Our panel of teachers reconvened to talk about how remote learning is going, what it’s like to be back in the classroom, and the ups and downs of what may (hopefully) be the strangest academic year of their careers. Our teacher are Matthew Dicks, a fifth grade teacher in West Hartford, Connecticut; Brandon Hersey, who teaches second grade in Federal Way, Washington, and is also on the Seattle school board; Cassy Sarnell, an early childhood special education teacher in Albany, New York; and Amy Scott, an eighth grade English teacher in Durham, North Carolina.

What are some of the most common mistakes teachers make when working with ELLs, and what should they do, instead? Many of us who teach English-language learners make lots of mistakes in our classroom practice. This six-part series will explore what the most common mistakes teachers make with this vulnerable population and what should be done in their place. Today’s column features responses from Marina Rodriguez, Altagracia (Grace) H. Delgado, Dr. Denita Harris, and Sarah Said. Here are my choices: confusing lack of proficiency in English with lack of intelligence; looking at ELLs through the lens of deficits instead of assets; and trying to rush ELLs to be “reclassified” as English proficient to look good under the Every Student Succeeds Act. The biggest mistake that many schools are making now during the pandemic is not providing extra support to ELLs.

Using the popular game in station rotation activities during distance learning is a way to bring an element of play and collaboration to writing assignments. It is a playful approach that aligns with Resnick’s 4 Ps — projects, peers, passion, and play. What’s more, it embeds the self-determination theory, the idea that students become motivated when they have a sense of autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Students are immersed in exploring a digital environment where they already may feel competent, and so have a sense of autonomy. These worlds are multiplayer, enabling students to feel like they are again in a community—pixels don’t require physical distancing.

A review by graphic novelist Nathan Hale (Hazardous Tales series) in comics format helps inquisitive young citizens learn how we choose who runs our country.

Early childhood literacy advocacy has been a quiet casualty of our current annus horribilis. Back in the BCE years (Before Covid Era), considerable interest had been building among practitioners and policymakers in curriculum and instruction built on the “Science of Reading.” That critical conversation has been largely sidelined for obvious reasons as states, districts, and schools prioritize setting up and running remote and hybrid learning plans and focus on a return to in-person schooling with public health imperatives more than instructional ones, first and foremost. But a pair of recent events have re-energized literacy advocates and may help push the conversation about reading instruction back to the front burner in a way that’s been absent for the last several months.

When the pandemic disrupted school in the spring, Brandie Gogel did everything she could to keep her students with disabilities on track. She used YouTube to broadcast music therapy sessions. She made paper packets for students who couldn’t connect to the internet. When summer rolled around, she continued to meet regularly with her elementary schoolers over Zoom, hosting virtual field trips on her own time. Still, parts of their special education plans had to be put on hold. Without being in the same room, some things just weren’t possible. Now, Gogel is back in her classroom in Polk County, Florida, where schools have been open for two months. Already, she’s seen students’ communication and motor skills getting stronger. But things haven’t exactly returned to normal.

“The word of the year is ‘pivot’” our assistant middle school principal told us as we prepared to return to school this fall. At the time, I expected that meant being flexible in my lesson plans, being ready for day-to-day disruptions, and accepting challenges as they come. Turns out, it also means pivoting my head back and forth between my Google Meet screen and the students in my classroom. My school is offering in-person classes for the many parents and students who opt in. We keep these students in two groups, sending half in person Monday and Tuesday and the other half Thursday and Friday. Wednesday is an all-remote day for deep cleaning and community building for teachers and their advisories. We will soon pivot once again and offer more students the chance to come in person for four days instead of two. A handful of families have already elected to keep their children fully remote and will likely continue to do so.

Picture books enable readers to see themselves reflected in the larger world. With increasing Muslim representation in published books, all readers can explore the diversity of Muslim communities, identities, and cultural backgrounds as they intersect to create unique expressions of Islamic cultures and practices. Picture books also offer a visually intimate look into Muslim experiences and places where individual and private family traditions, conversations, and interactions flourish. The books featured in this article were published in 2019–20 (with one from 2018) by mainstream publishing houses.

World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, today announced Cynthia Leitich Smith as the winner of the 2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. The biennial NSK Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the world of children’s and young adult literature. Leitich Smith is a New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-selling YA author of the Tantalize series and Feral trilogy and won the American Indian Youth Literature Award for Young Adult Books for Hearts Unbroken. She is the author-curator of Heartdrum, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books, which will launch its first list in winter 2021. Leitich Smith is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation.

Literature introduces people to worlds they have never set foot in, which is why it is so important for classroom libraries to be full of diverse stories that reflect students’ backgrounds and cultures. Students seeing themselves in the stories they read to foster a sense of belonging, recognition, and most of all, validation, is crucial—representation matters. Students also need to read stories that show experiences other than their own to expand their worldview. Teacher Natalya Gibbs believes that early exposure to diverse literature forms understanding students who can relate to people of all walks of life. Even as learning has shifted online, the ethos of a diverse library can be carried over and adapted to the virtual classroom.

Early reading teachers and researchers are reacting with surprise, frustration, and optimism after the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the organization that designs one of the most popular reading programs in the country, outlined a new approach to teaching children how to read. A document circulated at the group’s professional development events, first reported on by APM Reports on Friday, calls for increased focus on ensuring children can recognize the sounds in spoken words and link those sounds to written letters—the foundational skills of reading. And it emphasizes that sounding out words is the best strategy for kids to use to figure out what those words say. While the document suggests that these ideas about how to teach reading are new and the product of recent studies, they’re in fact part of a long-established body of settled science. Decades of cognitive science research has shown that providing children with explicit instruction in speech sounds and their correspondence to written letters is the most effective way to make sure they learn how to read words.

When created well, instructional videos can be a highly effective medium for supporting instruction in remote, hybrid, and flipped or blended learning environments. Effective instructional videos are concise—no more than six minutes if possible, as that is the proven drop-off point for attention—have a clear purpose and focus, and, above all, are interesting and engaging. Fancy equipment or software isn’t necessary to create great instructional videos, although there are free or low-cost apps and programs for enhancing and improving videos to make them more engaging for learners. I’ve found success creating instructional videos that fall into three broad categories: screencasting, explainer videos, and live demos.

Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver have done this Zoom thing before. That’s what it’s like, in the time of COVID, to promote a book — in this case their children’s book “Lights, Camera, Danger!,” the second in their “Alien Superstar” series, which they discussed Sunday at the Times Festival of Books. Though they are 35 books into their collaboration, Winkler and Oliver have a new mission now — to help kids adapt to a radically changed world by helping them escape. “One of the things that’s really important to us in our books is to make sure that they’re entertaining,” says Oliver. “If we can bring a little lightness and a little joy, that’s a nice thing. … It motivates us more to get our work done because it really has an important place in kids’ lives.”

The author of one of the nation’s most influential and widely used curriculum for teaching reading is beginning to change her views. The group headed by Lucy Calkins, a leading figure in the long-running fight over how best to teach children to read, is admitting that its materials need to be changed to align with scientific research. The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, where Calkins has served as founding director for more than 30 years, says it has been poring over the work of reading researchers and has determined that aspects of its approach need “rebalancing.” Calkins’ changing views could shift the way millions of children are taught to read. Her curriculum is the third most widely used core reading program in the nation, according to a 2019 Education Week survey.

The odds are that, at one point or another, all of us teachers are going to end up teaching in some version of a “hybrid” environment this school year. That could mean teaching some groups of students two days each week in the classroom, while they spend the rest of the time doing asynchronous online work. Worst of all, it could mean teaching students simultaneously online and face to face. This series will share the experiences of educators who have already begun teaching in this kind of situation. In today’s post, the teachers stress the importance getting to know your students, benefits of a “flipped” classroom, differentiation, and more.

Classroom libraries should include culturally inclusive texts. More important, though, teachers should be using these texts to affirm and challenge students in real and intentional ways. It starts with read-alouds. Instead of dropping the books in a bin in your classroom library, put them in your daily lineup. We know that students benefit from being read aloud to on a daily basis, so be conscious of the books you’re choosing to read. Think about how texts can be tied into your existing curriculum. Teaching about drawing conclusions? This skill can be applied to many books, and I am sure that one of your diverse texts will fit the bill. Consider using different texts even when introducing math or science concepts. It may take a little more time to prepare the lesson, but it will be worth it to allow students another opportunity to see themselves in literature. Let’s not stop there. Take things a step further by allowing students to really discuss the texts.

From preschool to college, education continues to evolve in response to the coronavirus pandemic. In their own words, people who are living and working through this experience shared their victories, frustrations and strategies.

One-third of schools in Colorado’s second-largest district use a reading program the state has rejected and researchers have panned for promoting strategies that run counter to science. Another 20% of schools in the 84,000-student Jeffco district rely exclusively on a district-created core reading curriculum that some educators and school board members say is hard to navigate and has numerous holes. These problems came to light after Jeffco officials released a school-by-school list of K-3 reading curriculum, meeting a long-standing request by parents, advocacy groups, and media outlets to make the information public. Previously, district leaders didn’t know what each of Jeffco’s 90 district-run elementary and K-8 schools used to teach children how to read. The list of reading curriculums illustrates not only the stark differences between Jeffco schools, but also the large number of district schools that are out of compliance with a 2019 state law requiring them to use K-3 reading curriculum backed by science.

In mere weeks the U.S. will tally votes and a new president will be chosen to serve our country as the leader for the next four years. Helping children understand the election process and the importance of voting can actually be enjoyable with the help of books. Discover children’s books that celebrate and discuss the United State’s representative democracy in this board and picture book list below.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there’s been a lot of discussion about digital equity in U.S. public schools. But the virus has drastically expanded another gap that is key to children’s learning and wellbeing: out-of-school enrichment. Through enrichment, children form bonds with peers and mentors and find sustenance for their passions, interests and social-emotional development. At the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, we have conducted many studies of out-of-school programs that serve Black/BIPOC and low-income youth. Community-based organizations, such as Boys and Girls Clubs, The Clubhouse Network and YOUmedia Learning Labs, are safe spaces where young people can stop by after school to hang out with friends, get help with homework, take enrichment classes and grab a snack. As we look toward long-term support for online and hybrid learning, it’s imperative that public leaders consider critical equity gaps and quickly move to increase funding for enriched and out-of-school time learning.

Reading lessons held via video conference could be just as effective as face-to-face classroom teaching in providing literacy help to struggling children. A pilot study from Macquarie University’s reading clinic is among the first to test whether online lessons work for children with reading difficulties, after thousands of students turned to online lesson delivery during the coronavirus pandemic. Lead researcher Saskia Kohnen said the findings could open up learning opportunities for struggling readers in rural and remote areas, who were often isolated from access to professionals providing high quality literacy interventions.

Babies and young children are sponges that soak in practically everything in their environments. It’s true! Even during story time, their minds are at work, taking in all the language they hear and lessons the characters learn. Reading to your child — at any age — will boost their brain development, listening skills, vocabulary, your bond, and so much more. And all it takes is a few books, motivation, and a little time. Here’s how to get started.

With all the talk of remote learning for secondary schools and colleges, one important population is missing from the nationwide conversation about learning during the pandemic: babies and toddlers. Many parents are keeping their little ones away from playgrounds, playgroups and preschool preparatory programs. As a result, the social and learning opportunities for the youngest children have been curtailed, just like everyone else’s. Those who study and work with the youngest children are concerned about the effects on learning and school readiness. “There is going to be a bit of a collective lag in academic skills and in those executive-function skills that allow a child to navigate a classroom more easily,” the developmental psychologist Aliza W. Pressman predicted.

In the 1990s, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley studied families from different socioeconomic levels and found that their children were exposed to vastly different numbers of words in their formative years—specifically, 32 million more words for higher-income children than for lower-income children. The variability in exposure accounted for significant differences in children’s language skills when they entered kindergarten, the researchers s found, and had a direct impact on how students fared early on in school. But now, the study’s conclusions are contested by recently published research from the psychologists Douglas Sperry and his wife, Linda, which found less straightforward connections between the quantity of words children hear and their family’s socioeconomic background. Their findings have inspired a growing debate around whether biases about race and class influenced the original study’s methodology—and distorted the takeaways.

I had been teaching as an elementary teacher for 17 years when my beliefs on how to teach reading were shattered. Prior to my revelation, I had earned a master’s degree in reading, attended so many conferences and workshops, and read every professional book about reading that I could buy. I was confident that I knew everything about how to teach reading and writing. Yet despite all my efforts, my daughter couldn’t read. My gut told me that she had dyslexia, but at that time, there was very little information about the disability. Since her diagnosis, I have put all of my time and energy into learning. about dyslexia, how the brain learns to read and what science has been telling educators for 40 years. I have attended Orton-Gillingham training sessions all over the state and taken courses on the science of reading. Now, as an educator, I’m driven to help those children who have been left behind – not because their teachers did not try to help them, but because the science is not in the classrooms and not in teachers’ professional-development training.

In New Orleans, even as classes remained remote, a number of schools started catching their special education students up over the summer, evaluating whether they have regressed and strategizing about the best ways to help them bounce back. Now, as students are starting to come back to schools in person, educators are refining those plans and assessing whether their special-needs students need more individual support. Schools credit a push from the state, which prioritized providing assistance aimed at boosting the quality of distance learning, for their swift move to address special education losses. Over the summer, state officials urged schools not to wait for complaints to roll in to begin providing compensatory education.

The essays, stories, poems and letters commissioned by Wade Hudson and Cheryl Willis Hudson for “The Talk” focus on preparing children for a world that can be bewildering and hostile. Written before 2020 began its assault, they only gain relevance as we close in on a heated presidential election. They also make plain that the hard conversations we all need to have about race are part of a broad reckoning with our nation’s history. The book’s black-and-white images project love and support. By contrast, “This Is Your Brain on Stereotypes,” written, illustrated and published by Canadians, seems almost alien in its upbeat perspective. With amiable authority, Tanya Lloyd Kyi explains how natural it is for humans to “sort and label the world around us,” and what dire consequences can occur when we put people into categories that weaken their social standing, as witnessed by the horrors of Nazi Germany.

We know that reading is an act of constructing meaning, so whenever we give students materials to read, we need to provide them with the necessary tools to understand those texts. Distance learning requires us to provide these tools in new ways—and with a greater degree of intentionality—so that we support students as they become increasingly independent. Just as a builder can’t succeed without the correct blueprints, students need to see the blueprint for how they can succeed in our classes. In distance learning, that means we need to carefully communicate the purpose for reading each text before students begin the assignment, and this purpose needs to align directly with any assessment given.

To maximize time with students, the titles we use must meet high standard: They must serve as instructional resources, they must be accurate and authentic, and they must be engaging enough to return to time and again as mentor texts. These featured picture books, board books, and graphic novel are for all ages. These titles showcase beautiful language and a higher vocabulary, and can be used with multiple levels of readers. They also explore prevalent themes and important concepts, which can be used across subject areas. Additionally, these books transcend standards for pre-K–12 learning. They can be used in reading, writing, and language instruction. Some are appropriate for social studies and even science. They can also serve as mentor texts and touchstones, which provide continuity for students while saving instructional time by using familiar books.

TESOL International Association’s 6 Principles for Exemplary Teaching of English Learners provides an intuitive framework, based on well-established guidelines of language teaching and second-language acquisition research; this framework has been vetted by experts and teachers from TESOL’s international community of practice. Taken together, they form a comprehensive approach, which is in no way experimental. The principles and their key practices are universal enough to apply to a broad range of teaching contexts where students are learning English. “The 6 Principles Quick Guide: Remote Teaching of K–12 English Learners” is the application of TESOL’s six principles for a sporadically charted context that has challenged us educators to our limit. My hope is that I provide a clear pathway that will help us regain a true sense of self-efficacy. The guide is a quick read, and when you are finished, you will feel, “This is a lot of work, but I do know how to do this because I can draw on what I already know about teaching K–12 English learners.

As schools wrestle with how to hold classes in the middle of a pandemic, Kelly Mrozik is among the hundreds of teachers and more than 11,000 students back in classrooms at the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District. She teaches at Dena’ina Elementary School, near the city of Wasilla, about an hour north of Anchorage. Mat-Su, as the district is commonly called, is Alaska’s largest school system to resume in-person learning this fall. And now, more than a month in, students and adults say school is going surprisingly well.

The successes of those districts that make the leap to in-person schooling are likely to encourage neighboring ones to follow suit, even as some others—most recently the Boston district—flip back into remote learning following increases in local COVID-19 cases. Interviews with leaders in four school districts, all in different phases of in-person learning, elucidate the successes and challenges district leaders face in returning to brick-and-mortar schooling. Enforcing mask-wearing? Much less of a concern than many of them originally feared. Instruction? Still a major challenge, the superintendents said, pointing in particular to the pedagogical burden on teachers who must juggle both in-person and online formats. They also point to the ways in which “normal” schooling, if a vaccine is developed in coming months, will probably look different from the era before COVID-19.

On the Point, we discuss diversity in children’s literature. There is wide agreement amongst educators that children benefit from books portraying diverse characters. Despite this, very few children’s books featuring protagonists of color are published each year. We talk about why diversity in books is important for children, and the efforts of authors, educators and booksellers to bring diversity to bookshelves.