Today’s Literacy Headlines

Like many students who have shifted to remote learning, Leslie Novoa’s three children are jumping on Zoom calls and missing their classmates. Ms. Novoa and her family live in a shelter in Brooklyn run by the nonprofit organization Win, a major provider of shelter for homeless families in New York. On Tuesday, her little ones heard some good news: Win was distributing free books to the children in the facility. The books came from First Book, a nonprofit that provides free and inexpensive books and learning materials to children in need. To help organizations like First Book as they assist some of those most impacted by the coronavirus, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has started a Covid-19 Relief Campaign. This monthlong campaign will benefit First Book and three other agencies offering support to those affected by the outbreak.

We know we should limit kids’ screen time. But learning has moved online. What can educators, parents, and students do to make sure online learning doesn’t become unhealthy? Here are three recommendations for keeping our online lives as healthy as possible: Teachers who want their students to watch videos as part of their homework might consider which could be listened to instead—perhaps during a walk around the neighborhood (while practicing social distancing!). For taking notes, encourage students to go analog. Even before I converted my own course to a distance-learning format, I asked students to bring a notebook and pencil to class. Scientific research shows that taking notes by hand is more beneficial than typing away on a laptop. When delivering an online class, periodically cue students to look away from the screen (e.g., “Now, from memory, redraw the figure we discussed last week”).

Before he became a journalist, Nehemiah Frank was a teacher and school administrator. So when the schools closed in Tulsa, where Frank edits The Black Wall Street Times, he was the family member best positioned to oversee distance learning for his 5-year-old cousin Caillou. The first packet sent home from school contained second-grade work. That was frustrating, but not as disconcerting as issues that arose as Frank and Caillou started making their way through kindergarten-level assignments that followed. The boy had speech issues, did not know all the alphabet, could not recognize the most basic sight words and had terrible penmanship. Before Frank took over his schooling, the family wasn’t aware of any of this. With the help of a friend who is a speech pathologist and some online resources, Frank used the first month of the school shutdown to teach Caillou to pronounce his letters and helped him rocket ahead in math. But he wonders how far behind the boy would have fallen.

Three-quarters of U.S. states have now officially closed their schools for the rest of the academic year. While remote learning continues, summer is a question mark, and attention is already starting to turn to next fall. Recently, governors including California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo have started to talk about what school reopening might look like. And a federal government plan for reopening, according to The Washington Post, says that getting kids back in classrooms or other group care is the first priority for getting back to normal. Here are nine key ideas — drawn from interviews with public health experts, education officials and educators around the country — for what reopening might look like

Eighth graders’ grasp of key topics in history have plummeted, national test scores released this morning show. Except for the very top-performing students, scores fell among nearly all grade 8 students in history on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also called the Nation’s Report Card, compared with 2014 results. Scores fell in geography, too. Only in civics, the third subject tested, did students’ scores remain flat. The history and geography findings add to growing evidence of a broad-based widening of learning gaps between top performers and the most struggling students. “The bottom of the distribution is dropping at a faster rate,” said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “These results are not designed to point to why this is also happening, but we clearly see a correlation here that’s disturbing.” Different groups of 8th graders took NAEP’s 8th grade reading and its civics, geography, and history tests, but Carr surmised that students who struggle to read would likely face an uphill fight with the social studies subjects.

Coping with the unknown brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic could prove especially difficult for students with autism, many of whom struggle with communication and abrupt changes in routine. To help families and educators, the National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorder compiled a guide, “Supporting Individuals with Autism During Uncertain Times” that recommends seven strategies to support the needs of individuals with autism. The 60-page guide includes exercises and resources designed to help caregivers implement the strategies at home. Among 8-year-old children, about 1 in 54 are identified with autism spectrum disorder, recently released Centers for Disease and Control Prevention data indicate. Kara Hume, an associate professor of applied developmental science and special education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Education and faculty fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, led the team that created the guide. In this Q&A, Hume, a former elementary school special education teacher, offers advice on how schools and families can work together to support students with autism as they adjust to life without school. The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

The most common library services offered to students during the COVID-19 shutdown of schools? Reader’s advisory and storytime/readalouds were tops in middle schools and elementary schools, respectively, according to School Library Journal’s recent survey.

Last year saw small increases in pre-K spending, enrollment and quality, but the authors of the annual report, State of Preschool Playbook, say bipartisan action is needed to protect programs from another recession. Publicly funded early-childhood education programs are at risk of experiencing “long-term damage” due to the pandemic’s effect on the economy, according to leaders of the National Institute for Early Education Research. “The current and looming economic crisis poses a considerable threat to state-funded pre-K,” said W. Steven Barnett, NIEER’s senior co-director and founder. “It needs to grow and improve, not just hold on.” Barnett noted even with the country entering a recession, he’s encouraged preschool has been a bipartisan issue, and states that lean in opposite directions politically “share a commitment to high-quality preschool education.”

Little Free Library, a nonprofit based in Hudson, Wisconsin, United States was awarded for contribution to global literacy from the World Literacy Foundation. The Little Free Library was awarded for its significant contribution to global literacy. The announcement was made today at the World Literacy Summit. Little Free Library aims to inspire a love of reading, builds community and sparks creativity by fostering neighborhood book exchanges around the world. It is reported that two out of three children living in poverty have no books to call their own, and children growing up in homes without books are on average three years behind children in homes with lots of books. The library aims to fill these book deserts by placing libraries where they can make a big impact through the Impact Library Program. Proudly recording over 100,000 book-sharing boxes in over 100 countries around the world, Little Free Library helps to exchange millions of books annually.

The National Reading Panel’s findings remain as strong and supported as they were that April day 20 years ago last week. The panel emphasized that good reading instruction incorporates explicit and systematic instruction in five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Despite the clarity of the NRP’s determinations, we are still facing the same literacy challenges two decades later. We have continued to fail at improving the teaching and learning of reading. More than a third of our fourth-graders still can’t read at grade level, according to national tests, with the numbers even more dire when it comes to African-American, Latino and low-income students. As highlighted by journalists such as APM Reports’ Emily Hanford, although we may know how to effectively teach virtually all children to successfully read, we simply aren’t putting that knowledge to work in our teacher education programs and elementary school classrooms.

Prolonged school closures associated with the coronavirus pandemic are likely to have a major and negative affect on children’s learning, according to a wide range of experts — leaving some students behind academically for years to come, and even leading to meaningful lost income over the course of their lifetimes. Problems are likely to be especially concentrated in younger children and lower-income households, but not necessarily limited to them. Andrew Rotherham, the co-founder of Bellwether Education Partner and an education policy staffer in the Clinton administration, offered the most optimistic assessment I found, telling me that for middle-class parents of older kids, “this will be not that big of a deal.” Even so, he says he’s very worried about “early grades where we’re focused on literacy, which really is foundational to your experience in school and life” as well as for low-income kids of all ages.

In the midst of the coronavirus, summer reading may not feel like a top priority—but the school break will be here before we know it. How can educators help keep kids engaged from afar? This podcast playlists for elementary, middle, and high school listeners can help. Each list is pegged to this year’s Collaborative Summer Library Program reading theme, Imagine Your Story. These podcasts are free and easy to listen to from any device via popular apps such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher or from a website like the podcast search engine Listen Notes. You can link these playlists to your library’s summer reading web page or create your own using Listen Notes, which lets you build and share playlists with its Listen Later feature.

The new question-of-the-week is: What can reading and writing instruction look like in the age of the coronavirus? All contributors today are teachers in the National Writing Project network. The National Writing Project is the nation’s largest network of teacher-leaders, K-university and across the curriculum, focused on improving the teaching of writing and learning in schools and communities nationwide.

Reading research has shown that phonemic awareness is the most reliable early predictor of a child’s reading ability, a better predictor than even a child’s IQ. Phonemic awareness refers to a person’s ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in words. Difficulties with phonemic awareness can cause reading and spelling problems, because if a child has difficulty identifying individual sounds in words, the child will have trouble connecting those sounds to letters. Reading and spelling require accurate and efficient connections between the sounds of our language and the letters that represent those sounds.

The sudden switch to remote learning for the 1.1 million public school students in New York City has presented the nation’s largest school system with its greatest challenge in decades. There is also a crisis within the crisis. The city is home to roughly 200,000 public school students with disabilities. Now, the already-strained special education system must transform how they are educated, which includes crucial services — like speech, occupational and physical therapy — that are extremely difficult and in some cases impossible to translate online.

The Moravia Judy Center, which runs early childhood programs at Moravia Park Elementary School, started its home visiting program for pre-K and kindergarten students in 2016, sending pairs of teachers into students’ homes in an effort to build mutually supportive relationships with their families, most of whom are poor enough to qualify for public assistance. The visits are modeled after a method that was devised more than two decades ago by Parent Teacher Home Visits, a nonprofit based in Sacramento, and have quickly expanded to more than 700 communities in 27 states and Washington, D.C. With its method, teachers and school staff travel in pairs to visit a family at least once — either at home or in a neutral public setting like a park — usually ahead of the school year. The teachers arrive prepared to listen: They do not take notes, fill out paperwork or lecture. Instead, they want to know about the family’s hopes and dreams for their child, and connect with their soon-to-be student in a nonschool setting.

Talking with children builds their vocabularies and knowledge. But as a result of the press around the documented “word gap,” or the large average differences in how much parents from high versus low socioeconomic backgrounds talk with their children, parents might feel pressure to continuously talk to their children. We know from the science that this isn’t quite right. Our work shows that the quality of the talk matters more than the quantity, and that children themselves need to be engaged in the conversations for more learning to occur. For example, in recent work led by Rachel Romeo we found that children who engage in more conversations at home, not children who hear more talk, show more efficient brain processing when they listen to language and have better language skills. It’s the conversations that are key to learning. Perhaps even more importantly, this isn’t all about learning words – it’s about building knowledge, as words bring with them concepts and ideas.

For students with special needs—roughly 7 million in the U.S. ages 3 to 21—the coronavirus pandemic, and its attendant school closures, can be especially scary. At school, they get individualized attention from professionals who are trained in, and deeply familiar with, their unique ways of thinking, perceiving, and processing. But no amount of love and care at home can turn the average parent into a special-education teacher overnight. Nor can it enable them to practice occupational, speech, or physical therapy—services that are provided in many schools, but aren’t always covered by insurance and can therefore be otherwise out of reach. “A lot of students have had one-on-one professionals with them in the classroom, along with general-education and special-education teachers supporting them,” Elizabeth Barker, an accessibility researcher with the Northwest Evaluation Association, told me. “Now we’re asking parents to step into all of these roles.” For many special-education students, the tools that other children are using to make remote education possible—online platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, printed work packets—just aren’t accessible. Students with disabilities often use assistive technology; for instance, a student with visual impairments might use screen-reader software to have text read aloud, or a braille reader to read the text themselves. But a lot of online platforms aren’t compatible with assistive technology—and even when they are, other problems frequently arise.

For all the exhausted families trying to keep their children entertained during the coronavirus pandemic, here’s some good news: Michelle Obama is hosting story time. The former first lady announced that she is teaming up with PBS Kids and Penguin Random House to host a weekly read-aloud series. For four weeks starting on April 20, Obama will read from one of her favorite children’s books in an event called “Mondays with Michelle Obama.” First up on the list is “The Gruffalo,” written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Families can tune in to the livestream on PBS Kids’ Facebook page and YouTube channel, or the Penguin Random House Facebook page.

New research finds that harnessing children’s interest in cause and effect promotes early literacy. Young children are committed to making sense of their world. That’s why they exhaust the adults around them by getting into everything. A new study, born of the insight that kids want to understand how things work, gives an exciting clue on how to get kids excited about reading. Kids prefer books rich in details on causality.

Creating lifelong readers is the goal of any school program, but many districts struggle with how to build a culture of literacy among students. Faced with that dilemma, educators in Tuscaloosa, AL, set out to find a solution and discovered the answer was right in front of them: Put the people most closely involved with reading in the same room—school librarians, reading specialists and literacy coaches. This holistic approach to literacy, one that engages the very staff who address reading at every level, is paying dividends. The early successes lead district officials to believe their goal of making sure every third grader can read on grade level is achievable.

Author Mary Amato offers help to jump-start your creativity. Everybody loves a good story. As an author, I’ve got to make sure that every story I write has a strong beginning, a surprising middle and a satisfying end. Here’s the beginning and middle of a new funny story — and now I’m challenging you to finish it! You’ll find tips for the writing process and suggestions for how you can share the story once you’re done. Grab your notebook, sharpen your pencil and turn on your brain.

It’s important for children to understand that everyone is different, and that our differences make us wonderful and unique. But sometimes, this message isn’t so easy to convey. These books that celebrate differences and disabilities highlight characters who are different from (and in some cases similar to) the reader. From the real life story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, who had a deformed leg and eventually became a cyclist, to John Green’s novel about a girl coping with anxiety, these books embrace the things that make us who we are.

Sarah Garland is the executive editor at The Hechinger Report, and she’s been watching as parents like her across the country have been forced to sub as teachers while schools are closed because of COVID-19. For students, school as a mainstay of day-to-day life has evaporated. Garland talked about what she’s hearing from teachers, parents and students as they adapt. She also shares what she’s experiencing herself and what changes might still be yet to come. “What I think is fascinating is that these districts and experts know that online learning — completely remote education — is really, mostly, a last resort. That the vast majority of technology used in education goes with a really skilled, in-person teacher and that’s what’s missing. So even in these places that absolutely know what they’re doing, and have teachers who’ve been trained for years in how to use technology well and do online learning in the classroom, are still struggling because they’re missing that key in-person element, which is the relationships with kids, peer-to-peer interactions, all of that stuff that a great teacher knows how to do and that you just cannot do very well online.”

Across the nation, differing visions of how and when to reopen school buildings that were closed—many for the rest of the school year—to slow the spread of the coronavirus are creating tension among local, state, and federal officials. “There is no research and there is no best practice for this kind of mass extended closure,” said Stephen Pruitt, the president of the Southern Regional Education Board and a former education commissioner in Kentucky. “This is going to be new for everyone.” Governors—working alone or in cooperation with newly created multistate consortia—are considering a variety of factors as they determine when to ease their stay-home directives in general and when to reopen schools. Those factors include whether public health officials can effectively track the spread of the virus to allow for more targeted mitigation efforts; whether hospitals are prepared and equipped to treat patients; and what modifications schools should make to their operations to allow for social distancing in classrooms.

A new podcast that pairs kids ages six to 10 with authors to create short stories aims to spark creativity in its young listeners. Betsy Bird, a librarian who blogs at “A Fuse #8 Production,” hosts The Story Seeds Podcast, which was created by Sandhya Nankani. Season one includes a coronavirus PSA by Jason Reynolds and episodes feature Reynolds as well as authors Dan Gutman, Veera Hiranandani, Chris Grabenstein, Aram Kim, Rajani larocca, Carlos Hernandez, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Bil Lepp, and Tracey Baptiste. They meet with children in New York City, sometimes take a little field trip, and turn their discussion and adventure into a growing story.

A partnership between your public library and the public school district makes sense. Both organizations can save money by sharing space, personnel, and collections. Both can reach out to new patron groups through shared programming and marketing and leverage their partnership when it comes to advocacy and grant writing. What’s not to like? Before making the leap into a partnership, it’s important for decision makers to understand the sometimes complex issues at hand. In my 10-plus years as library director, the issues that require the most consideration are space, collection building, personnel, and programming and marketing.

As schools and learning have moved online, one of the biggest challenges has been providing special education. An estimated 14% of public school students receive such services in the U.S., and federal law requires schools to provide them. The U.S. Education Department has offered schools some flexibility, but with no road map or template for how to teach special needs students in this new world, teachers have been forced to innovate, adapting as they go along. “We’re seeing kids have services because people are being creative,” says Kelly Grillo, a special education coordinator at Cooperative School Services who oversees special education at two rural school districts in Indiana. She’s inspired by the ways teachers have embraced familiar tools, like Youtube, or apps like Remind. And it’s not all high technology. For students who don’t have access to the Internet, Grillo and her team — like many teachers across the country — are resorting to phone calls and text messages as well.

As every state now deals with schools that have been shuttered to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many district leaders have struggled to figure out how – or even whether – to provide virtual learning for the estimated 55.1 million kids out of school. Expanding e-learning districtwide raises thorny questions about digital equity and access, especially for students with disabilities, children living in poverty and those who are homeless. This has forced school leaders to ask, “If we can’t teach every student equitably, should we be teaching any at all?” In Washington state, districts have spent weeks weighing the dilemma of trying to teach all students, or no students, remotely. The answers have not been simple. But early lessons from the first center of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. could offer a preview of the ongoing questions that will consume the nation’s public schools for months, if not longer, as the temporary closures appear likely to last through the rest of this academic year and potentially into the next.

There are many school districts across the country that have been struggling to set up distance learning programs for students. Online offerings are sometimes nonexistent or spotty at best, and getting paper work packets to students is a near impossibility with much of the country’s public life shut down because of the covid-19 crisis. So where to turn? One possibility: your local public television and radio stations. Many of these stations across the country are partnering with school districts and state education departments to provide curriculum-based lessons and educational programming — all free and commercial free. And in some places, award-winning teachers are leading the lessons. According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, its members reach almost 99 percent of the country, including areas where families have no Internet service.

I have spent much of my time as an educator concentrating on providing mirrors to my students so that they can see their identities reflected in the works that they read. Right now, I am also very consciously making sure I include Asian voices and perspectives to provide windows to non-Asian readers so that they develop the empathy necessary to recognize and combat xenophobia and racism. Luckily for all of us, there are so many good, complex, and contemporary books for all ages about the Asian experience. My 7-year-old son was reading Bao Phi’s A Different Pond. It’s the subtle and beautiful story of a father and son who go fishing together. As they sit quietly and wait for fish, the father talks about growing up in Vietnam, a different pond from where they are now in the United States. We so often live in our own worlds, unable to envision what it is like in others’ landscapes. This is a time for more understanding. Cultural literacy is about fluency in another culture, its customs and beliefs; it is understanding gained through literacy.

As American families shelter in place due to COVID-19, children with hearing loss may need additional help at home, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). The association offers parents guidance:, Here are two examples. Turn on closed captioning. Watching Frozen for the 100th time? Even if your child knows every line of the movie by heart, practicing reading along can help them keep up with new dialogue when you finally switch movies or shows. Most streaming services offer the option for closed captions or subtitles. Set aside time for regular face-to-face activities. These could take the form of a board game or meal together. During this time, make sure all screens are down and eyes are up, so everyone can fully capture what is being communicated.

As the coronavirus pandemic has forced the vast majority of schools across the country to close, educators are scrambling to find ways to keep reaching students during a crisis that is exacerbating existing inequities and increasing academic gaps. The twelve teachers interviewed for this story—from the Mississippi Delta to San Francisco, Texas, Arizona, subarctic Alaska, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—identified the four most urgent needs that must be addressed in order to help reduce rapidly increasing disparities in access to learning.

Starting April 14th, The Reading League (TRL) will host a daily 30-minute live educational television broadcast on WCNY, Central New York’s PBS affiliate. The program will run from 2:30 PM to 3:00 PM every weekday for the duration of WCNY’s “TV Classroom” broadcasting. The Reading League’s program, called “Letters and Language with Katie and Kelli,” will be hosted by two leading TRL coaches and longtime educators, Kelli Johnson and Katie Sojewicz. The program will primarily serve an elementary-level student audience and focus daily on phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and the blending of words and phrases. Like all TRL programming, the televised lessons will be deeply rooted in evidence-based reading instruction.

One of the most frequent questions an author hears from students is how they started to write—and how young people can start, too. Maybe that’s why a number of middle grade and YA authors have created writing and journaling guides for kids and teens. With schools closed and millions of students learning from home, it’s a fertile time for young people to find their writing voice in the midst of chaos. These four standouts will help.

With the outbreak causing indefinite school closures across the country, children are having to figure out new ways of learning and playing together while living in isolation. Special correspondent Karla Murthy checked in on one second-grade class in New York City to get a glimpse of how their worlds have changed – and what remains the same. Classroom social-distancing doesn’t have to mean the end of social traditions.

As schools close in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, educators and parents alike are thinking about how the ways that kids spend the coming months will affect their school readiness in the fall—especially in the development of crucial reading skills. Children living in disadvantaged communities are particularly vulnerable to falling behind. Harvard education professor James Kim has some guidance to offer amid all this uncertainty. Kim is the key person behind READS for Summer Learning, a read-at-home literacy program designed to help students sharpen their reading skills when school is out of session. Research has shown that the program, which was developed for use by school districts, helped students in high-poverty elementary schools gain nearly 1.5 months of reading skills on average compared with non-participants. As the likelihood grows that classroom doors may be shuttered for months, Kim is providing all READS resources free online and is adapting them ​for use by parents and caregivers. Recently, he discussed why reading matters so much, what parents can do to encourage more of it, and how educators should be rethinking summer literacy programs.

In Dinuba, Calif., in the Central Valley, Dulce Meave cares for 14 children for 11 hours a day. Some arrive as early at 4 a.m. so their parents can go to work in nearby fields or packing houses. Most are Latinx, and about half speak Spanish at home. Yet Meave, a former preschool teacher who opened her home child care program two years ago, hasn’t had the opportunity to have much training in how to support young children under 6 learning two languages. And that’s a shame, because research shows that without specialized support, young dual language learners (DLLs) are likely to fall behind in school and lose their home language. But thanks to $5 million in new state funding, Meave is participating in a unique, locally developed training program to support teachers and caregivers of young DLLs and help ensure children are ready for kindergarten. Developed in Fresno, the Language Learning Project was recently awarded $1 million by California’s Department of Education to expand across the state, one of six funded projects.

With most of the world’s schools shut because of the coronavirus crisis, you can now find a lot of advice on the Internet about the best ways to carry out distance learning at home, where more than 1.5 billion students are now supposed to be getting their lessons. If you want a thorough rundown of what to do and not to do, read the following 19 strategies from renowned master educator Andy Hargreaves. Hargreaves, a research professor at Boston College and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa, has been working for decades to improve school effectiveness.

School-public library collaborations take many forms, with both sides committing to increase access and opportunities. Planning and implementing colocated libraries, where one site serves both an educational institution and the public, can be complex. But those who have established joint-use facilities say the shared libraries can greatly benefit both populations. Whether the partners are fully enmeshed in policy and procedure or have some autonomy, the goal is better access and fiscally responsible resource sharing.

When he was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in January, author Jason Reynolds envisioned a crazy year with even more travel and visits to schools and juvenile detention facilities than usual. But, as with everything else, those plans have changed because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Today, the Library of Congress announced a new way Reynolds would reach out to young people during this stay-at-home-time. On April 14, Reynolds will begin a biweekly video series called, “Write. Right. Rite.” to inspire young people to tell their own stories, as well as a monthly newsletter for parents and educators on “relevant topics of the day.” The program is the first initiative for his platform, “Grab the Mic: Tell Your Story,” and is a collaboration among Reynolds, the Library of Congress (LOC), the Children’s Book Council, and Every Child a Reader. The videos and newsletter will be found on the “Grab the Mic” page on the LOC website.

The timing for this year’s “Drop Everything and Read” Day couldn’t be better. With coronavirus quarantines leaving us at home and looking for things to do, the D.E.A.R. reading celebration day this Sunday could be a welcome distraction and possibly the start of a daily reading habit. D.E.A.R.’s mission is simple: to encourage families to take at least 30 minutes on D.E.A.R. Day to enjoy books together. Nashville Public Library officials say reading aloud to your preschool child is the single most important activity you can do to prepare them for school and that continuing to read to, and with, them is invaluable.

For the last 40 years, scientists across a number of disciplines have studied how our brains turn abstract symbols, or letters, into words — in short, how we learn to read. Different pieces of research, using cleverly designed experiments and high-tech brain imaging, have created a fairly clear picture of how the brain learns to wire itself to recognize words on the page, and have shown how the brains of high-flying readers wire themselves to make the process automatic. That’s led to a new idea in some education circles: that there’s a scientific way to teach reading — a systematic approach shaped by those brain-science discoveries that would help most students master literacy by the end of third grade. It’s a system that could be especially helpful to those with learning disabilities, like dyslexia. And the implications might be even more important as school districts and parents seek to teach kids at home in the wake of this month’s widespread school closures.

The night before a safer-at-home order was issued in her Wisconsin town, all Pernille Ripp could think about was getting to her books. When her middle school opened for a few minutes the next day, the seventh grade English teacher and creator of the Global Read-Aloud grabbed all the books she could from her classroom library, before the school closed for the foreseeable future. “I went to my classroom and grabbed a ton of books I could read aloud to my students online,” Ripp said. “I thought that this might be it for the rest of the school year.” Teachers across the nation are turning to digital read-alouds not only to keep student skills sharp, but to forge connections while they’re apart. Instead of gathering around the rug or a “lit circle” for a story like they used to do in class, some teachers are gathering students on the “virtual rug” of a Zoom conference call or Instagram Live to continue reading books to them. Online read-alouds allow teachers to provide students with a daily dose of literacy—and maybe even some laughs.

Nearly 30 disability rights and education advocacy organizations have launched EducatingAllLearners.org, a resource hub and online network designed to answer questions and provide insight about remote learning for special education students during the coronavirus crisis. Keeping services flowing for special education students has been difficult. Confusion over guidance from the U.S. Department of Education and fear of violating federal laws, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, has left some school districts struggling to get their online learning programs off the ground. Acknowledging that difficulty, the alliance aims to provide resources to ensure the millions of students with disabilities in the nation’s schools aren’t further marginalized. EducatingAllLearners.org users can create a free account to share ideas, contribute to discussions and access case studies and webinars. The site will also host virtual office hours with special education attorneys, parent advocates, and educators to field questions about legal rights and classroom practice.

In response to the spread of coronavirus, schools across the nation, including the University of Nevada, Reno, are transitioning to online learning for a period of time. This adjustment can be a challenge for some students; particularly those with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Cady Stanton has coached people with autism or ADHD for the past 15 years and has studied the role it plays in academic outcomes. People who have ADHD or who are autistic tend to have more executive function challenges, to the point where it can really interfere with their productivity, and ability to organize and set goals for themselves. They really do need external support. They also need a lot of understanding and encouragement from those around them, and to not have the challenges that they face minimized.

To be successful, remote instruction requires a lot of the same things any instruction does: clarity, review, checking for understanding, prompt feedback. But distance adds additional challenges, and these tips can help. But even in the best of circumstances, remote instruction can intensify challenges inherent in face-to-face settings. Research has shown that online learning doesn’t generally work as well as traditional instruction—and that students who are already struggling are likely to be harmed the most. Still, in recent weeks some experts and practicing teachers have offered pointers that can help remote instruction be as effective as possible.

John Daniel, superintendent of Cottonwood Public Schools in rural Oklahoma, talks about the challenges of making sure students don’t fall behind when many of his students and teachers don’t have access to computers, Wi Fi, or even reliable cell phone service. The one good thing that might come out of this experience, Daniel said, is a public commitment to ensuring digital access to all of Oklahoma and the rest of the country. You can learn more about Daniel and Cottonwood if you listen to Episode 2 of Season 2 of ExtraOrdinary Districts.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act outlines specific requirements for identifying and educating children with disabilities, but the coronavirus crisis has sparked fierce debate over how adaptable the law is to a world where online education may be the only option. For some educators, the biggest challenge has been determining how to handle students’ Individualized Education Program, the carefully constructed plans designed to meet the educational needs of children with learning and physical disabilities in an online learning environment. More than 7 million children in U.S. schools have IEPs, leaving no room for a one-size-fits-all resolution. Education Week interviewed three experts—a special education attorney, an attorney who represents school districts in special education disputes, and a professor who studied special education law for decades—to find out what advice they have on handling IEPs during the global pandemic. During the discussions, three common themes emerged. Schools should: provide services to students as soon as possible; worry more about making progress than following the letter of the law; and understand that much of federal law wasn’t written with online education in mind.

Amid the flurry of new technologies used by K-12 schools to fire up remote learning in recent weeks, a piece of seemingly antiquated technology is playing a key role: the television. School districts are getting help from an old school tech solution—television stations—that includes a cross-country public broadcast initiative to deliver remote e-learning activities while the unprecedented wave of school shutdowns affecting more than 55 million students continues. On Monday, public television stations in New Jersey and the Washington D.C., metro region started featuring the at-home learning program, which is now set to air in all 50 states. In other cases, school districts are producing new original educational programming on their own local cable stations. The effort amounts to a low-cost alternative and readily accessible solution for districts that have been forced to develop and implement long-term online lesson plans on the spot, while facing a shortage of available devices and WiFi accessibility for many students.

The federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act allocates $13.5 billion for K-12 education through a stabilization fund, of which at least 90% is intended for school districts through the Title I aid formula, including serving English-language learners, and the rest of which can be used for most educational purposes. The package also includes a $3 billion fund for state governors to use as they wish to help K-12 and higher education.

Comprehension is a complex and gradual process involving factors that don’t lend themselves easily to scientific measures of effectiveness—with one exception: metacognitive strategies, techniques that help readers think about whether they’re understanding what they’re reading. Many studies of these strategies, generally lasting no more than six weeks, have shown positive effects. Other kinds of studies have shown that background knowledge and familiarity with the conventions of written language also have powerful effects on comprehension. While their effects have been measured, we don’t have scientific data that shows boosting them has a direct impact on reading comprehension. Given the abundance of data on the effectiveness of strategies, educators and reading experts have placed greater weight on comprehension “skills and strategies” than on the other elements of comprehension.

If you’re trying to keep up with reading lessons at home during the coronavirus school shutdown, now is a good time to explore reading science materials with early readers. ReadWA leaders suggest these sources, which are geared toward both parents and educators. Some are free, but others cost money. For students who are well on their way to knowing how to read, Seattle schools reading specialist Julie Bedell suggests buying two copies of the same chapter book, and reading it aloud with your child. The book should be a bit harder than what your child can read on his or her own. With this exercise, the parent serves as a “scaffold,” helping the student sound out unknown words, and defining the meaning of words. It helps children map new words into their brains, and helps with comprehension and builds vocabulary, Bedell said.

Tomie dePaola brought comfort and laughter to young readers for decades. His death this week after a fall felt somehow more difficult to endure for his fans and friends at this uncertain time when the world could use Strega Nona to blow a few kisses and save the town. Unable to gather together and remember him in person, even those closest to him took solace in his literary legacy. “His books radiate his love of life, food, family, music, art, travel, culture and friendship,” said Lin Oliver, president of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and a friend of dePaola for 40 years. “His joyful spirit and big heart spill from every page. Who doesn’t love both Nanas, the one upstairs and the one downstairs? Who doesn’t cheer for Oliver Button when he triumphs over those bullies? Who doesn’t think of Strega Nona every time you put up a pot of pasta? “Tomie’s books offer children his soul and spirit, which is why they will be forever loved. In that sense, he is with us forever.”

WizardingWorld.com is hosting Harry Potter At Home, a hub of information and activities for parents, children, and carers to discover the magic of Harry Potter, by reading or listening on their own or together with loved ones, whilst staying at home. Explore the hub for a wealth of creative and craft activities, quizzes, puzzles and more. There will also be a weekly email newsletter bringing fresh ideas into inboxes each Friday.

“I miss my friends and all the specials that we had like P.E., music, computer lab,” says Nina Daer, a third-grader from Tempe, Ariz. Coronavirus has shut down schools across the country, forcing millions of students to learn at home. Parents and kids are struggling to adjust to this new reality. In this video, families from Seattle to Maine react to how they feel during this time and talk about what it’s like to navigate these changes together. “You’re not used to me being your teacher, so I think I get a little more pushback than you normally give your other teachers and little more attitude when I ask you to do work,” said Stephanie Petrides, a parent from Bethlehem, Pa.

April is National Poetry Month and is often celebrated across the nation’s schools through reading, writing, and sharing poetry all month long. While many students will be home this month due to the COVID-19 crisis, poetry can be a source of comfort as we face tremendous challenges and waves of uncertainty. Poetry can also serve as an expressive outlet for the small moments of joy students may be experiencing as well as the difficult feelings they are navigating. Poetry offers a pathway for students to look inwards but also to look outwards to take notice of the sights and sounds of their everyday lives at this moment. In this post, we share ways you and your students can celebrate poetry from home. There are low-tech suggestions that include drawing, noticing, wondering, and composing. There are also high-tech suggestions including the investigation of online poetry sites and ways to incorporate technology into the composing and sharing processes.

As schools, teachers and families face the shock of abruptly shifting to online education, one small question has been how to shift these read alouds to Zoom, Facebook, Google Hangouts and YouTube, the spaces where many classes continue to meet. A second question has been given almost equal importance: Is reading a book to students online even legal? The short answer is, well, yes. While many well-intentioned commentators have warned teachers against this practice, the fact is that copyright law—specifically fair use—permits many read-aloud activities online. As instructors and learners adapt to new educational environments, copyright concerns about reading aloud need not be among the challenges they face.

Novelist Jacqueline Woodson is a slow reader. Taking her time lets her savor each word, brings her closer to each story, and it lets her pay respect to her ancestors who weren’t allowed to read. Jacqueline Woodson is the author of nearly thirty books for children and adolescents, including many award winners like Brown Girl Dreaming and Miracle’s Boys. From 2018 to 2019, she served as the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and from 2014 to 2016 served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate.

Tucked away in the $2 trillion coronavirus stabilization bill is a provision that allows Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to seek congressional approval to waive parts of the federal special education law while schools combat the coronavirus pandemic. Schools are scrambling to shift classes online as more than 55 million children stay at home. For now, that has upended special education, which is administered through meticulously devised plans called Individualized Education Programs, or I.E.P.s, which require extensive services that are not easily transferred to the internet. Students who qualify can have moderate to severe disabilities and require a range of support, such as tutoring and behavioral assistance, hands-on services like physical and occupational therapy, and specialized staff. Such services are critical for school districts to comply with IDEA’s mandate that students with special needs receive an education comparable to that of their peers. The possibility that those obligations could be waived has driven a sharp wedge between school administrators, parents and special education teachers