Today’s Literacy Headlines

With school on break, along with all the homework, tests and early start times that come with it, parents often assume that young people’s stress and anxiety will take a pause as well. However, that’s not always the case, especially as the novelty of summer dwindles. Without the daily structure of school and extracurricular activities, kids may struggle with boredom or restlessness. Maintaining a routine during the summer can be a powerful tool for supporting children’s mental health, and parents can play a crucial role in establishing and reinforcing this structure.

Author, poet, aviator and adventurer par excellence, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is one of the most well-known French writers in contemporary history. This year marks the 80th anniversary of his most famous publication, Le petit prince (The Little Prince) published in 1943. Le petit prince is translated into over 250 languages with adaptations into radio plays, films, ballets, operas, musicals, children’s board books, and even an animated film. You can find a copy in Yiddish or the Burundian language of Kirundi.

With so few words, most of them kid-friendly, it should be a piece of cake. But it depends on who’s holding the whisk. Translator Daniel Hahn say,”I believe my job as a translator is to preserve all the dimensions of a book, not just one of them. When I find complexity, my job is to keep complexity, or more accurately to reconstruct it. And some of the most complex books I’ve reconstructed have been children’s picture books.”

Many children struggle with learning to read. Neuroscience offers a better way. Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene’s work brings clarity to what we learn from neuroscience about teaching reading. He speaks eloquently about championing equity and hope for overcoming reading problems not only in America and France but across languages. No matter what writing system one uses, there is only one reading circuit in the brain, and by and large, all readers use that same circuit.

ALA Annual kicked off on Friday in Chicago in a most appropriate way for these times—a conversation with Judy Blume. In a discussion with Simon & Schuster senior vice president and publisher Justin Chanda, Blume talked about why she wanted to attend the conference this year, the differences between book banning attempts in the 1980s and today, and her lifetime love for libraries and librarians.

Summer school programs often struggle with regular attendance. The Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA), a research-practice partnership between Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Department of Education, analyzed attendance rates in a 2022 voluntary summer school program for low-performing students in 10 districts statewide. It found that only 1 in 8 students attended 90 percent or more of the days offered.

Gov. Jared Polis shares how and why his state has invested in the field and how that work could be scaled nationally.

“Sometimes it’s nice to be alone. Just you, reading your book. … But what if a friend stops by?” Here are four [picture books] that pay tribute to those who seek alone time.

Elementary through high school students are eager for nonfiction. Here’s how to find the books they’ll want to read.

Most teachers say that their professional learning isn’t providing them with much access to expert advice, especially when it comes to supporting English learners and students with disabilities, according to a new survey of educators from the RAND Corporation. The research, conducted during the 2021-22 school year, surveyed a nationally representative sample of about 8,000 math, science, and English/language arts teachers across grades K-12.

New research from the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK has found evidence that talking to toddlers helps to shape their developing brain. A team from the School of Psychology at UEA led by Professor John Spencer, captured thousands of hours of language data from babies and toddlers who were equipped with small recording devices. MRI scans were also carried out to explore the structure of the participants’ developing brains, focusing on a substance called myelin.

The average test scores for U.S. 13-year-olds have dipped in reading and dropped sharply in math since 2020, according to new data from National Assessment of Educational Progress. The average scores, from tests given last fall, declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in math, compared with tests given in the 2019-2020 school year, and are the lowest in decades. The declines in reading were more pronounced for lower performing students, but dropped across all percentiles.

Before Indiana students can learn how to read, their teachers have to learn how to teach reading. But how that’s done may soon change at teacher preparation programs across the state, as Indiana joins a national push to adopt reading practices shown to improve literacy. By 2025, new teachers will be required to demonstrate their proficiency in the science of reading — a term for a wide body of research that emphasizes phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and phonemic awareness in reading instruction. And programs risk losing their right to call themselves “accredited” if their curriculums aren’t based in reading science by 2024.

Many decisions that directly impact kindergarten are made in schools by principals. There are many tools, however, that school districts, states, and even the federal government have to establish conditions for effective kindergarten programs and teaching in the ways that young children learn best.

More than 90 percent of deaf children in the U.S. are born to hearing parents. For them, the path forward can be difficult and also controversial. The advent of cochlear implant technology has the opportunity to change lives, yet many deaf advocates say not teaching sign language is a risky proposition. Rhode Island PBS Weekly’s Pamela Watts reports on the stark choices some parents face.

Tenette Smith, executive director of elementary education and reading at the state’s department of education, said [that improvement in Mississippi’s reading scores] has everything to do with the act’s multi-pronged approach to boost reading proficiency. Lesser publicized strategies that are having a positive impact include free, full-day pre-K programs that promote reading readiness; universal screening for literacy three times a year for students in kindergarten through 3rd grade; individual reading plans (IRPs) for students whose screening results are below grade level; and formal methods for parents to engage in those IRPs. Underscoring these strategies is a significant investment of $15 million per year to support literacy, 60 percent of which goes to coaching and intervention services staff.

If you’re looking for a secret ingredient to explain Mississippi’s rise in reading achievement on the Fourth Grade Reading National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the last decade, you won’t find it. Some have even called that achievement “the Mississippi Miracle,” but you won’t find a miracle either. The tireless, hard work that has gone into supporting educators, students and families is surely no miracle. And it didn’t happen overnight. What did happen was the resurgence of a conversation about the right way to teach reading, which is grounded in science.

Going forward, 30 or 45 minutes of every reading class in Bibb County will be spent building phonemic awareness, a core skill in what’s called Structured Literacy or, broadly, the Science of Reading. This year Georgia legislators passed two state laws mandating Science of Reading and Structured Literacy. This month Governor Brian Kemp appointed a state Director of Literacy, Amy Denty, to steer the application of those standards in every school district in the state.

From YouTube to TikTok, ­librarians’ videos are promoting early literacy and allowing access to learning activities. With people watching an average of 17 hours of video a week, these suggestions will inspire you to hit Record.

In my eight years of teaching in Philadelphia and its suburbs, I’ve worked with first through fifth graders from diverse racial and economic backgrounds. I’ve worked in both low-performing schools and higher-performing ones, and the same problem keeps cropping up: So many kids can’t read. I’ve seen first graders who don’t know what sound “a” makes and fifth graders who can’t read two-syllable words. Why is this happening? People blame COVID, but the problem predates the pandemic.

Three of 4 elementary teacher-preparation programs don’t adequately cover all the core components of reading instruction—and many still teach methods that run counter to evidence-based practice, a new review concludes. The review, from the research and policy group the National Council on Teacher Quality, analyzed syllabi, textbooks, and other course materials from 693 teacher-preparation programs across the United States.

Part 1: After 25 years and more than $250 million, many Oregon kids still struggle to read because they are taught using ineffective methods. To address this, Gov. Tina Kotek is backing the state’s single largest reading investment in two decades, the Early Literacy Success Initiative, a $140 million grant program to get “evidence-based literacy instruction” methods into classrooms in districts that apply for the funding.

Over the past three decades, Lucy Calkins helped create a set of strategies for teaching children how to read, known as balanced literacy. It was widely adopted in the United States, including in New York, the country’s largest public school system. But doubts about the approach persisted, and now it seems that using balanced literacy has given a generation of American students the wrong tools. This podcast discusses the story of balanced literacy and how Professor Calkins is trying to fix the problems that the technique created.

A counting book is tricky to write, for it must inspire readers to do two things at once: to count and to read. Five new counting books solve this puzzle in different ways, but they all share one essential strategy: to start a conversation.

The elementary grades are a great time for students to learn about world languages. Simple strategies include having signs in multiple languages.

Children who struggle to pay attention tend to do less well at school than their classmates and go into lower paying jobs as adults, according to a new study. And children who find it difficult to manage their behavior at school are more likely to end up in jail. “Our study found broad support for the notion that people’s early experiences and skills really matter when they reach adulthood, despite everything that happens in between,” said Andrew Koepp, of the University of Texas at Austin, lead author of the study. It also means that helping children manage their attention and behavior will benefit them in later life, he added.

Storytelling is a powerful way to develop community, to teach, and to empower. When teachers tell their students stories in which characters overcome challenges, we empower students. When classes gather and listen to stories, they develop a sense of belonging.

ABCs. 123s. The first year of school has come to an end, and it’s graduation time. These seven titles are the perfect picks for celebrating this monumental milestone.

With only a few days left in third grade, LaQuencher Sanders’ 8-year-old daughter, Kamryn, just wanted to be done with school. This year, as the end of the year approached, she had a sense that her reading scores on the test she took in the spring may not be high enough for her to move on to fourth grade automatically. That meant that to avoid having to repeat the grade, she would likely face more summer school and another year of tutoring.

My advice to teachers of English-learners is basically the same as what I tell all educators I work with: Students need to talk in class because the one doing the talking is the one doing the learning. When I say “talk,” I’m referring to academic talk. Sounding like a book involves rich vocabulary and habits of thought that need to be taught and learned, which is different from talk outside of the classroom. In other words, formal talk versus informal talk. Also, leading the conversation in the classroom makes students feel enormously proud of themselves. Alternating between direct instruction and small-group work, educators can gradually build each student’s knowledge base as well as ownership.

For years, Gene Luen Yang was convinced a single character in his groundbreaking graphic novel would doom any attempt at an adaptation. What changed? Almost everyone who reads “American Born Chinese,” Gene Luen Yang’s groundbreaking graphic novel, is a little afraid of Chin-Kee. The book is a classic of young-adult literature, threading together stories of Asian American boyhood with a revered Ming dynasty novel. Chin-Kee’s role in it is a small one, but he is the bomb at the book’s heart.

Jason Reynolds can do anything. From verse to prose or a superhero novel to a fusion of art and text, his moving examinations of modern society are captivating, innovative, and beloved. Reynolds is the recipient of the 2023 Margaret A. Edwards Award, given annually by the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, and sponsored by SLJ, for his novels When I Was the Greatest, The Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys, Ghost, and Long Way Down. In honoring Reynolds’s work, the committee noted that he “presents teens with authentic mirrors and windows to the world.”

With an all-out effort over the past decade to get all children to read by the end of third grade and by extensive reliance on research and metrics, Mississippi has shown that it is possible to raise standards even in a state ranked dead last in the country in child poverty and hunger and second highest in teen births. One pillar of Mississippi’s new strategy was increasing reliance on phonics and a broader approach to literacy called the science of reading, which has been gaining ground around the country; Mississippi was at the forefront of this movement. The Barksdale Reading Institute [in Mississippi] is developing a free online tool, Reading Universe, to make the state’s approach to reading available to all schools in America and around the world. The idea is that kids everywhere should have the same opportunities to learn and graduate as, say, students in high-poverty schools in the Delta.

New York is the latest large city to join a national push to change how children are taught to read. But principals and teachers may resist uprooting old practices. Principals will lose control over selecting reading programs at their schools, and their union has criticized the speed of change. And many educators still believe in “balanced literacy,” a popular approach that aims to foster a love of books through independent reading time but that experts and the chancellor say lacks enough focus on foundational skills.

Analogies help students remember new information by connecting it to frameworks or contexts they already know. The science of memory tells us that a novel stimulus is more easily remembered if it has an existing framework or assimilative context to which it can “connect.” The more established the framework, the more readily accessible that stimulus will subsequently be.

Play and pleasure reading topped the list of responses to the question: What summer homework should students be assigned? Teachers (of both young and older students) were more likely than the principals who responded to suggest that kids need a break in the summer. “For young children, specifically pre-K to grade 3, I feel that over the summer children need to have their summer break and be provided with the opportunity to explore, get plenty of physical activity, and play. Children learn from play. Play teaches children about problem-solving and social interactions,” said Tara Hughes, a pre-K inclusion teacher at the Nye Early Childhood Center in Santa Fe who was voted 2023 New Mexico State Teacher of the Year.

School districts around the country are pushing to help students bounce back from the pandemic’s profound academic damage: expanding literacy tutoring in Detroit, cutting class sizes in New York City, and buying science-backed reading curriculums in districts across Colorado. Chicago Public Schools has turned to academic interventionists — a cadre of hundreds mostly classroom teachers already on the district’s payroll, tapped this year to turbocharge the learning of struggling students one-on-one or in small groups.

Studies show that too much noise, particularly loud noise, can hurt a child’s cognitive development, notably for language-based skills such as reading. That’s because if noise is just, well, noise, it distracts developing brains and makes it more difficult for children to concentrate. But when their environment is quiet enough for them to pay attention to sounds that are important or particularly interesting to them, it is a powerful teaching tool. “[Young children’s] brains are craving sound-to-meaning connections, so it’s very important that the sounds around them be nourishing and meaningful,” says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University.

Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said that while social media offered some benefits to younger people, including the ability to connect with communities, it also exposed them to potential harms, such as cyberbullying and content that promotes eating disorders, self-harm and other destructive behavior. Social media also hurts exercise, sleep and other activities, he said. What can parents do? One is to explore potential options to limit children’s screen time. Let’s go through them. Google’s and Apple’s mobile operating systems offer free tools that can be effective for restricting screen time on smartphones and tablets. These tools allow parents to monitor and set limits on their children’s devices.

In the last century and now again, we have gone in and out of debates about the best way to teach reading — as if there was a single best way for all children — with the arguments focusing on phonics, whole language and balanced literacy. We’re in another cycle: Just this week, New York City, the largest school district in the country, announced it would require all elementary schools to employ phonics programs in reading instruction. This post — written by David Reinking, Peter Smagorinsky, and David B. Yaden — looks at the debate on phonics in a different way than is most often voiced these days.

It wasn’t long ago that as the chief academic officer for Tennessee’s public schools, I was seeking a program that would ensure that every teacher is equipped with evidence-based knowledge that they could easily translate into classroom practice. My team and I wanted effective training that was also affordable, both in terms of financial outlay and teacher time. We chose to develop our own, homegrown training. Our program, Reading 360, pairs research and theory with a strong emphasis on classroom application. We believe it offers a compelling—and streamlined—model for supporting all teachers as they make the transition to practice based on the science of reading.

State laws vary considerably regarding the curricula that schools can use to teach reading. Only a dozen or so take an active role in prescribing how districts pick their core English language arts programs. There’s also appreciable variation in how states approach a slew of other components that affect reading instruction, including mandating phonics, implementing interventions, providing training, and—more recently—prohibiting three-cueing. Indeed, there are differing opinions on whether classroom practice can be improved at all from the lofty perch of statehouses, but emerging research points out how some laws work better than others.

School districts in many states are reacting to state laws that dictate the kinds of books school libraries can have. That’s led to a small number of districts temporarily or permanently removing dozens of books from school libraries. That’s according to an April 2023 analysis by PEN America, a free speech advocacy group that tracks book bans nationwide. For that report, PEN America tracked book bans for the last six months of 2022.

Seven brand-new and time-tested books about sleepaway camp. To lose yourself in a camp tale is to beam yourself out of the sweaty monotony of your actual summer and into the sun-kissed universe of “The Parent Trap.” The thrills are vicarious and the miseries are validating in an entry-level schadenfreude kind of way. Here are seven flashlight-under-the-blanket page-turners to get you started — four of them recently released and the other three tried and true.

The turnaround in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates. Other states have passed laws adopting similar reforms that emphasize phonics and early screenings for struggling kids. As Mississippi climbed the rankings, the Barksdale Institute, an influential organization in literacy policy in the state, got phone calls from about two dozen states. The institute’s CEO, Kelly Butler, said she tells them there’s no secret to the strategy. “We know how to teach reading,” she said. “We just have to do it everywhere.”

A new study looking at absenteeism in kindergarten through 3rd grade in Delaware and the effect on students’ and schools’ academic performance calls for additional emphasis on ensuring consistent attendance in the early years. The negative academic impacts were not limited to students with large number of absences. The schoolwide effect in schools with higher-than-average absenteeism was sometimes up to 20 times the effect on an individual student’s performance

An outdoor approach to teaching preschool is gaining momentum nationwide. Long common in such countries as Denmark, Sweden and Germany, nature preschools and kindergartens have exploded in popularity in America over the past few years, growing from 250 in 2017 to more than 800 in 2022, based on a forthcoming report from the nonprofit Natural Start Alliance. In the past five years, five states have introduced legislation or established pilot programs to support outdoor learning as an alternative to traditional preschool and child care programs.

New research into child language acquisition has made strong links between cognitive skills and language learning, challenging long-term beliefs that children develop language skills independently of cognitive function relating to abilities such as spatial awareness. Results found that three main cognitive factors including: Verbal Cognition, Processing Speed and Memory – and additionally and Non-Verbal Cognition, contributed significantly to individual variation in language abilities.

In an evaluation of 26 public and private Ohio teacher training programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality released today, seven received A grades for instructing new educators in how to use the science of reading with young students, while six received Fs. The report offers some encouraging news for Governor DeWine who wants to ban other literacy approaches that have lost credibility: Colleges are teaching phonics — a key part of the science of reading — to teacher trainees. But just nine of the 26 programs fully covered all five parts of the science of reading — phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, along with phonics. In addition, most did not give new teachers enough practice with students.

Because the LTEL label itself indicates these students are taking longer than their peers to achieve English proficiency, a series of undeserving, deficit-based characteristics such as “unmotivated,” “struggling reader,” and “disengaged” often come attached to the label. When teachers perceive these students through this deficit lens, they may not have high expectations for them. In order to focus on these students’ assets, we are choosing to refer to them as experienced multilinguals. This assets-based term highlights the fact that these students have gained valuable life experiences and that they already speak at least one other language that can be used to help understand content and express their ideas.

“You don’t have to be published to write a poem,” says award-winning author and poet Clint Smith. “Poetry is in all of us.” He said it’s important for educators to “make poetry feel like an invitation rather than intimidation.” Below, three poetry teachers from around the country shared how they expand the boundaries of poetry in the classroom.

As many as 15 to 20 percent of students show some symptoms of dyslexia, such as inaccurate reading, poor spelling, poor writing, or mixing up similar words, according to the International Dyslexia Association. In this webinar, hear from these two educators as they discuss how to recognize early warning signs of dyslexia; the key components of effective intervention; what schools designed for students with the disorder include, and what they purposefully omit; and more.

New York City students are struggling with reading, but principals are worried that the rollout of a new teaching method is happening too quickly.

SLJ asked librarians and educators to weigh in on which classics should remain on summer reading lists. Inspired by the most popular titles that emerged, SLJ editors and members of NCTE’s Build Your Stack® Committee have curated this year’s round of “Refreshing the Canon” suggestions. Additionally, we’ve put together multimodal lists of recommendations—including nonfiction, graphic novels, documentaries, paintings, and more—that educators can feature in classrooms and libraries alongside the exemplar texts.

Two very different new novels for young readers bear striking similarities. Both feature boys narrating their own tales of taking on heroic tasks as they work through the emotional devastation of losing parents. (These quests echo ancient myths — Greek in one case, Cherokee in the other.) Both involve the serious challenge of surviving middle school. And both spring from the imaginations of National Book Award finalists.

New York City’s elementary schools will be required to use one of three reading curriculums, a tectonic shift that education officials hope will improve literacy rates across the nation’s largest school system. Now, city officials will require one of three reading programs: Wit & Wisdom, from a company called Great Minds; Into Reading from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; or EL Education. The new mandate won support from the teachers union, whose leaders expressed faith in the city’s efforts to train thousands of teachers on new materials.

Originally published in 1986, Gary Paulsen’s Newbery Honor-winning Hatchet endures as a survival story with the power to capture young readers’ imaginations, putting them in the shoes of 13-year-old Brian Robeson as a plane taking him to stay with his father for the summer crash lands in the Canadian wilderness. The following 6 multimedia recommendations will enhance readers’ understanding of the text while offering them new stories of survival, both real and speculative.

Now that AI is shaping nearly every aspect of our lives and is expected to transform fields from medicine to agriculture to policing, what do students need to understand about AI to be prepared for the world of work? To be a smart consumer and a responsible citizen? Here’s how to begin developing AI literacy, according to experts and educators.

For generations, families have relied on friends, family members and neighbors to help care for young children during the day. Friend, family and neighbor (FFN) care is the most common form of non-parental child care in America. Child care provided by relatives or other informal caregivers can offer valuable benefits for children, such as consistency of care, support of native language and culture, flexibility and affordability. As states work to stabilize the child care industry in the wake of the pandemic, experts are calling for more support for all child care settings, including the informal, home-based care, where so many children spend their days.

Half of children in grades three to eight fail reading tests. The city’s schools chancellor, who has faulted the current approach, will begin rolling out new curriculums next year. The curriculums use evidence-supported practices, including phonics — which teaches children how to decode letter sounds — and avoid strategies many reading experts say are flawed, like teaching children to use picture clues to guess words.