Today’s Literacy Headlines

Four years ago, when the staff at Danville Primary School found out they were going to learn a new way to teach reading, Mary Levitski thought: Here we go again. The 2015 training was different. Inspired by a tutoring center for kids with dyslexia in nearby Bloomsburg, Danville adopted a new approach that involved training every teacher using a somewhat old-fashioned method. Instead of buying glossy texts, it made its own workbooks. And it worked. Danville’s method relies on new reading science. It has roots in an old way of teaching but is based on new cognitive neuroscience research that has revealed how brains process sounds and symbols. It borrows from linguistics, the study of language and its structure. Students do not memorize lists of words for spelling tests, yet the average Danville fourth grader is spelling at the sixth-grade level.

As you read this sentence, your brain is making a series of rapid choices. As it processes each word, it’s matching it to one of tens of thousands in most adults’ vocabularies — about 60,000 for a skilled reader. “When you hear a word, you somehow magically, instantly come up with the meaning of that word,” said Bob McMurray, a professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. All readers — and listeners — do this, McMurray said, even first-graders who typically are choosing from a mental word bank of just 3,000 to 5,000 words. Just how children learn to make such quick determinations while reading and hearing words is the focus of a new research study of McMurray’s called Growing Words.

Every year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) throws a luncheon at its annual convention to announce the winners of two prestigious children’s book awards: the Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children and the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Authors Kate and Jol Temple and illustrator Terri Rose Baynton were named winners of the 2020 Charlotte Huck Award for their novel Room on Our Rock), a story about sharing and compassion that can be read forward and backward, revealing two narratives. The Charlotte Huck Award was established in 2014 to promote and recognize fiction that has the potential to transform children’s lives by inviting compassion, imagination, and wonder. Author Barry Wittenstein and illustrator Jerry Pinkney were named winners of the 2020 Orbis Pictus Award for their nonfiction book, A Place to Land: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. The Orbis Pictus Award, established in 1989, is the oldest children’s book award for nonfiction.