Today’s Literacy Headlines

A recent study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly explored how teachers’ use of Spanish in the classroom is related to students’ growth in English and Spanish. In the classrooms studied, Spanish was used in instruction, social interactions, and classroom management. They found that in classrooms where more Spanish is spoken, DLLs made greater strides in their L1 development when compared to their peers in classrooms where the home language was less utilized. pecifically, students’ Spanish auditory comprehension—that is, their ability to understand the meaning of the words they hear—showed greater growth than their peers. Surprisingly, however, students from classrooms with more extensive Spanish use did not outperform their peers in Spanish expressive communication—or, their ability to put thoughts into words and sentences. When it comes to Spanish expressive communication, the researchers found that students from all classroom types made expected growth.

A San Antonio Independent School District bus driver is creating black history in San Antonio by making it her personal mission to get the students who ride her bus excited about reading. Jackie Washington has become a face and voice for SAISD’s Rolling Readers Program, where kids have access to technology on the go. Washington has been passionate about shaping the program and the kids who ride her bus. “They like to listen to the audiobooks or play a little game that’s on there,” Washington said. “We have district-friendly Wi-Fi.”

What better way to celebrate and teach your kids about Black History Month than with some great children’s books? We asked a few kid-friendly bookshops across the country to give us their favorite titles that families should be reading for Black History Month – and every month. The Flying Pig Books in Shelburne, Vt., Read with Me in Raleigh, N.C., and Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Ga., gathered a handful of recommended reads on shelves now. We’ve also included some new titles, for the voracious young readers who have already checked these books off their lists.

Picture this: a Saturday morning, the room buzzing with conversation and movement. The youth writers sitting at the Comics/Graphic Novels table laugh and nudge each other, pointing out details in their images and words. The university student who has organized this breakout session sits nearby, guiding and encouraging them. Assorted graphic novels and comics, how-to books, art supplies, and templates are within easy reach. When he is ready to stop reading, he claims a big box of crayons and begins his own Superman and Doctor Octopus story. At a time when we are seeing cuts to creative writing and arts education in schools, having spaces such as this one where young people can pursue their love of writing and explore different ways to write is crucial. This has been the philosophy behind our Young Authors’ Studio (YAS) initiative, a free writing workshop at Arizona State University (ASU) for students in grades 5–12.

Fifty million. That’s how many words Pajaro Valley students in grades K-3 have read under an app-based, bilingual early literacy initiative launched in 2017. The Pajaro Valley Unified School District initiative is attempting to bring students up to grade-level reading standards by the end of the third grade — a key milestone that correlates with success in and out of classroom. Literacy is the single biggest educational hurdle for many PVUSD students, according to Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez. Nearly half of the district’s 20,000 students are classified as English learners, and just 26 percent of third graders met state English standards last year. Called Paso a Paso Creciendo Juntos, Step by Step Growing Together, the early literacy push is built around app Footsteps2Brilliance, which draws on a curriculum of more than 1,000 books, songs and games in English and Spanish. Switching between languages can be done at anytime with the push of a button.

Schools across Minnesota closed down at the start of this week because of the extreme cold. It’s the right thing to do, so that kids aren’t being put at risk, said Sen. Chuck Wiger. But he thinks there’s another issue affecting Minnesota students that deserves the same level of urgency and decisive action: reading proficiency rates that have remained stagnant for years, and have even decreased for some student groups. Third-grade reading skills are a critical benchmark for students’ future success. By the end of third grade, they should have the literacy skills they need to transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Yet according to the latest state assessments, only 56 percent of fourth-graders tested proficient in reading. That number has remained relatively flat for years. Broken down by race and special status, the proficiency rates are even more alarming: Minnesota now has the widest gap in reading scores between white and nonwhite students in the nation. Only 32 percent of black fourth-graders and 34 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared to 66 percent of white fourth-graders.

Our focus, as caring adults, is to ensure that all kids get a solid start on literacy, learning, and the joy that comes from reading. Book deserts are real—not those self-imposed by the privileged choice to live in a book-dry home but the actual ones, where books are simply absent from the environment. In too many communities, books just aren’t available for purchase, borrowing, or rereading. In her Atlantic article, “Where Books Are All but Nonexistent,” Alia Wong provides a good overview of what this means and the factors at work, reporting on the findings of a 2016 study into access to print materials by Susan Neuman and Naomi Moland. The study, Wong writes, found “intense disparities in access to children’s reading resources in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC—even between a very poor neighborhood and a slightly-less-poor one within a given city.”

Learning to read is widely considered the bridge to later academic success. In hopes of ensuring that success, more than a dozen states, including Florida, require students to pass a reading test to advance to the 4th grade. While studies have questioned the effectiveness of retaining students to reach that goal, a pair of researchers has found that immigrant English-language learners in the Sunshine State benefited from the extra year of school and exposure to the language. Led by David Figlio, an education economist and the dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, and Umut Ozek, a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research, a study of 40,000 English-language learners in Florida found that students who repeated 3rd grade learned English faster and took more advanced classes in middle and high school than peers who moved on to 4th grade, but also struggled to learn the language.

Friday February 1 is the 10th annual World Read Aloud Day (WRAD), an event created to highlight the important of reading aloud to children of all ages and sharing stories. Scholastic is the title sponsor for WRAD and has just released its latest research on reading aloud, The Rise of Read Aloud. The results are mixed: While the percentage of parents reading aloud during a child’s first three months is up nearly 50 percent since 2014 and the number of 6 to 8 year olds being read to 5 to 7 days a week is up seven points since 2016, reading aloud drops dramatically after kids turn six. Parents think it is less important the older kids get and as children learn to read themselves, despite research that shows continuing to read aloud can be a key factor in literacy skill development and predicting whether kids ages 6 to 11 will be frequent readers.

Maria B. Salvadore is the 2019 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). This prestigious award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to library service to children and to ALSC. Salvadore is the former coordinator of children’s services at the DC Public Library System, and a long-time literacy consultant and advisory board member for various educational non-profits. She has served ALSC as a member-leader in numerous positions over 35 years of membership. Her expertise in literature benefitted a number of media evaluation and award committees, including chairing the 1994 Caldecott Committee. She has served on advisory boards and helped shape ALSC partnerships including NASA @ your library, Born to Read, READ * WRITE * NOW, and Prescription for Reading. Salvadore is an educator and author as well as an outstanding librarian. She was an adjunct professor in the College of Information Studies and in the College of Education of the University of Maryland, and while there she served on the Advisory Council to the team that created the International Children’s Digital Library.

Three dozen nationally known authors and illustrators will partake in this weekend’s annual African American Children’s Book Fair. Hailed as the oldest and largest single-day children’s literary event of its kind, the annual free event draws thousands. According to event founder and producer Vanesse Lloyd-Sgambati, the goal is to provide parents, caregivers and educators from the Philadelphia region a variety of literary tools for children of all backgrounds. The book fair also highlights the organization’s “Preserve A Legacy, Buy A Book,” initiative to create home libraries. “This is a book fair for all children, it is not exclusive to African American children, to celebrate our history and to know and understand our country’s history,” explained Lloyd-Sgambati.

When a child on Julie Callison’s bus was having a hard time sitting still, he didn’t get punished. He got a book. Callison asked the child’s sister, who also rides the bus, to read to the preschooler. Callison drives a bus and teaches for the Drew Central School District in southeast Arkansas, which serves Pre-K through 12th grade. She teaches special education for Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade at Drew Central Elementary. “When I handed her [the child’s older sister] a book, several other students on the bus said, ‘I want a book!’” Callison said. “I handed out every book I had in my bag and students began reading all over the bus. Some students needed help reading at which point I asked some older students to read to them. Students were no longer up and down out of their seat but quietly reading.” And the idea for the bus bucket of books and the book buddies was born.

Children’s Rights to Read—10 fundamental rights ILA asserts every child deserves—is a campaign in which ILA aims to activate educators around the world to ensure every child, everywhere, receives access to the education, opportunities, and resources needed to read. As a high school teacher of English as a second language (ESL), my job is to analyze my students’ needs and to develop their linguistic and communicative competence in English in all language domains. However, my goal as an educator is to create meaningful learning experiences that serve as pathways for connection. I can create those experiences through the framework of Children’s Rights to Read.

At Break-O-Day Elementary school in New Whiteland, students stuck around after the school day was over, playing board games, singing songs and getting on a computer. The activities help 30 students look forward to an extra hour of learning twice a week, a reading camp put on by Clark-Pleasant Schools, as they prepare for the IREAD test, an annual exam administered by the Indiana Department of Education to measure foundational reading skills in third graders. With the 10-week camp, teachers hope to get students who may have fallen behind grade level in reading skills back on track before the test in March.

This Friday, February 1, 2019, marks the 10th annual World Read Aloud Day (WRAD)—a global movement that highlights the importance of reading aloud and sharing stories. Founded by the nonprofit LitWorld and sponsored by Scholastic, the event is celebrated by millions of people in more than 100 countries. For many educators across the world, the event is an opportunity to engage students in discussion about the importance of global literacy and the dangers of illiteracy, build cross-cultural connections, and have fun. If you have yet to make plans for the day, don’t worry—the following resources offer inspiration and ideas for educators looking to harness the power of read-aloud.

School and family partnerships can be as important for students’ social and emotional development as for their academic progress, finds a new meta-analysis in the American Educational Research Association’s Review of Educational Research journal. So what worked? Researchers found the most effective parent-school programs included: home-based programs that taught parents how to model social and behavioral skills and mental-health support; coordinating and training parents in behavior supports, such as positive reinforcement and goal setting; and frequent collaboration between teachers and parents to set goals and monitor students’ progress.

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) recently released a dyslexia toolkit that provides 20 pages of guidance, meant to help teachers meet the learning needs of students with dyslexia or those who display characteristics of the language-based learning disability. According to the International Dyslexia Association, students with dyslexia often experience difficulties with both oral and written other language skills, such as writing and pronouncing words. KDE created the toolkit to assist in building an understanding of dyslexia and identifying early recognition characteristics. “Kindergarten to Grade 3 Dyslexia Toolkit” was designed in response to The Ready to Read Act (House Bill 187, 2018), which was passed last year in a bipartisan effort aimed at “decreasing the educational barriers students with dyslexia face.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s office of English-language acquisition has released the first portion of a guide designed to answer questions that families with English-learner students may have about public schools in the United States. The first two chapters of the English Learner Family Toolkit offer guidance on how to enroll children in school and a look at how schools in the United States may differ from those in other countries. Each chapter contains an overview of family and student rights, questions to ask schools, and links to potential resources. Colorín Colorado, a site for educators and families of English-learners, has also published a guide on how schools and early childhood centers can support immigrant students and families.

Like so many others who have come before her, author Meg Medina doesn’t remember what she said to the members of the Newbery committee when they called early on January 28 to say her book was selected as the Newbery Medal winner. She only knows that she made them wait on the other end of the phone as she pull herself through the “tsunami of feelings” washing over her at home in Richmond, VA. “I’ve known my husband since I was five years old,” she said. “There’s no part of my life I have lived that I don’t remember my husband being part of it, and this is so huge. It’s so huge. It was very meaningful to us.” Merci tells the story of a sixth-grade girl dealing with growing up and changes at school and within her large immigrant family. Merci’s family is “a functional, beautiful family that’s flawed, and I think that is a universal appeal,” said Medina, who is Cuban-American and grew up in a big, immigrant family in New York City. The middle grade novel is about how families work through changes, face problems together, and are rooted in love.

The Youth Media Awards (YMAs) winners were announced this morning at a press conference held at the American Library Association’s midwinter conference in Seattle. Below are SLJ’s reviews of titles that won medals or honors, in addition to past interviews with authors and illustrators. Many of our Best Books of 2018 were acclaimed by the various committees, and most of the winning titles received positive or even starred reviews.

Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X was a big winner at today’s Youth Media Awards, while Sophie Blackall and Meg Medina earned Caldecott and Newbery Medals, respectively, at the 2019 Youth Media Awards ceremony in Seattle at American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting. Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Medina won the John Newbery Medal, given to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” by Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). The Randolph Caldecott Medal, awarded annually by the ALSC to the most distinguished American picture book for children, went to Hello Lighthouse, illustrated and written by Blackall. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo won the Michael L. Printz Award, given each year to the book that “exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature.” The novel also won the Pure Belpré Author Award and an Odyssey Honor.

You may know Henry Winkler as The Fonz from Happy Days or the “very good” Bluth family lawyer from Arrested Development. Or perhaps, more recently, for his Emmy-winning role as the eccentric acting coach Gene Cousineau on the HBO comedy series Barry. But what Winkler is most proud of is, he says, may be his least recognized body of work: his best-selling children’s book series Here’s Hank, which follows the adventures and struggles of a dyslexic kid named Hank Zipzer. Winkler, who has dyslexia himself, pulls from his own experiences to write the series along with Lin Oliver. Winkler, now 73, says he didn’t know he had a learning disability until age 31, when he got his stepson tested and evaluated for dyslexia. “I went ‘Oh my goodness, that’s me,’ Winkler says. “And so at 31, I found out I wasn’t stupid, that I wasn’t lazy — that I had something with a name.”

ILA’s recent brief, Expanding the Canon How Diverse Literature Can Transform Literacy Learning, tackles this issue of expanding the canon of literature from only the classics and award winners to a wide array of works including various perspectives and peoples. In my own reflection on this brief, it seems crucial to continue to encourage student self-selection of texts, even if their choices make us (teachers/educational stakeholders) hesitant. Student choice sets the stage for literacy learning. Pairing texts like Slave Dancer with fellow Newbery winner Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson (Putnam) puts the African American voice center stage. All literacy educators can play their part in expanding the canon through inspiring student choice of both classics and contemporary literature which embrace diversity in its many forms.

The first Breakout Angie Sutherland designed was in response to a teacher’s request for an activity to help her students improve their teamwork skills. The teacher was concerned that her students didn’t communicate well when they collaborated on projects and that they gave up too easily when an academic task became challenging. Sutherland immediately thought of Breakouts, activities based on the popular escape room experience where groups of people working together under time pressure solve a series of puzzles. As a technology integrationist for Batavia Public Schools, a district outside Chicago, Sutherland was excited to give the strategy a try. After the success of the first Breakout, more teachers starting asking Sutherland for help designing the experience around their content goals. At this point, she’s done them in almost every grade – kindergarten through seniors in high school. This might feel like a natural fit for older kids, but not all teachers think their youngest learners can handle this much self direction. Sutherland says they can with thoughtful planning.

For students with disabilities, test accommodations can make the difference in their ability to show what they know. But a new study suggests that getting such supports one year is no guarantee of help the next year. In a new study in the journal Educational Assessment, researcher Heather Buzick of the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., tracked the performance and growth of students with disabilities in grades 3 through 8 on annual standardized tests in two states from 2005 to 2009. Buzick found that of the more than 4,700 students with disabilities who took the tests in each state, 15 percent to 40 percent of those with test supports had inconsistent accommodations from the prior year to the current year. Test supports—which can include extended time, having reading or math instructions or test items read aloud to them, or being allowed to use manipulatives to work through math problems—often vary by grade and subject.

Teaching students about digital citizenship does not have to be independent from your work as a literacy champion. Plenty of titles can help you do both. Here are some of my favorites that bring digital citizenship lessons into your classroom or library. Picture books are an excellent way to introduce digital citizenship to the youngest readers, but they can also be helpful reminders to our older students and useful for family conversations about technology habits and expectations.

Most Kansas students graduate high school nowadays. Yet many still struggle with the skills of reading and writing. Now a task force of educators, parents and lawmakers hopes to help close that gap. Over the past half year, the Dyslexia Task Force put together recommendations and this month handed them off to the Kansas State Board of Education. The group’s work is well worth paying attention to. It could change reading instruction for every public school student in the state. The goal? Catching a wide range of struggling readers and spellers earlier on. It extends far beyond dyslexia — though even that, some researchers say, is far more common than parents and teachers realized in the past.

There’s been a lot of concern about phonics instruction in recent months, sparked by an illuminating new audio documentary. But there’s another aspect of reading—comprehension—that is equally crucial, and teacher training in that area is even more problematic. One reason is the influential 2001 report of the National Reading Panel. The report endorsed five “pillars” of reading instruction, including phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, and vocabulary. The fifth pillar was instruction in strategies designed to boost comprehension, such as learning to summarize or make a graphic representation of a text. What the report failed to mention was the strong evidence showing that the most important factor in comprehension isn’t mastering strategies: it’s how much knowledge a reader has of the topic.

More large cities are taking the lead when it comes to providing pre-K programs, but a new study finds that less than half of the 40 largest cities in the country meet a research organization’s quality benchmarks for these programs. And, only 60 percent offer a pre-K program that reaches more than 30 percent of the 4-year-old population. The “Pre-K in American Cities” study was conducted by CityHealth, an initiative of the de Beaumont Foundation and Kaiser Permanente that provides city leaders with policy solutions to improve health, and the National Institute for Early Education Research, or NIEER, which is based at Rutgers University. The NIEER benchmarks include things such as a bachelor’s degree requirement for head teachers, a 1:10 or better teacher-child ratio, and the inclusion of health screenings.

Mayor Eric Garcetti announcing the end of the L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers’ strike on Tuesday was reason enough to celebrate. Then Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) City Librarian John Szabo heard something that made him even happier. More than a week earlier as the strike loomed, the library—and its 72 branches and central library—sent out the word: They would be open and available, ready to help students and families.”I was really delighted and pleased for all of our staff at LA Public Library when, during the announcement of the agreement, the mayor mentioned the library specifically and the programs that we provided during the week,” Szabo says. “That was great to see that at that very important announcement, the role that the public library played was highlighted and recognized. We made a concerted effort to provide additional programs, both passive programs and active programs,” Szabo says.

A new study says programs with strong organizational structures hold the key to effective early-childhood education, and lists exceptional administrators and collaborative teachers as the two most important components of those structures. The study was conducted by researchers with the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) and the Ounce of Prevention Fund, or Ounce, a Chicago-based nonprofit that advocates for and provides high-quality early-childhood education. They found that effective instructional leaders who are “strategically focused on children’s development and early achievement” are the most important element to having a strongly organized program.

The literary non-profit We Need Diverse Books has announced the winners and honorees of the fourth annual Walter Dean Myers Awards for Outstanding Children’s Literature, and if you haven’t read them yet you’re going to want to add them to your 2019 to-be-read pile immediately. The Walter Dean Myers Award, also known as “The Walter,” is named for prolific children’s and young adult author Walter Dean Myers — writer of classic children’s books including Monster — who was an early champion of diversity in children’s books.

This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Crestview Elementary third grader Hana Ismail is reading two books she picked out from her classroom library that feature Pakistani protagonists. “Four Feet, Two Sandals,” by Karen Lynn Williams and illustrated by Khadra Mohammed, tells the story of two girls who meet in a refugee camp. “Malala’s Magic Pencil,” by Malala Yousafzai, is about the young Nobel laureate, with illustrations by Kerascoët. “I get to pick out all my favorite books,” Hana said. “They’re really fun to read for me, and they give me more information about everything.” Hana’s favorite books to read have characters that look like her, part of a push in the North Kansas City Schools to get more education materials that reflect that the diversity of the student population.

Science and baseball are coming together for kids with a partnership between Discovery Education and Major League Baseball (MLB). The collaboration—which launched this week at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore with the team’s head groundskeeper analyzing turf samples with local middle schoolers—aims to get students to learn science and STEM concepts through baseball, utilizing the sport’s wealth of data and possibilities in gameday experiences. Different MLB-themed content has been integrated into Discovery Education’s STEM Connect and Steaming Plus services for educators to access. There is a free trial for all of the products and resources, which include: videos on MLB-themed and science-related careers such as groundskeeper, data analyst and operations executive; STEM Projects Starters for tracking data or speed or altitude of balls hit; and STEM In Action, which involves baseball-related problems to be solved primary sources and other research and real-world information.

What is it like to be a kid with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? Children with ADHD often struggle academically, socially and emotionally. They may be disorganized, forgetful, easily distracted and impulsive. And like all kids, they want to feel normal, says Dr. Sharon Saline, author of What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew. Saline, a psychotherapist who works with ADHD children and their families, argues that an informed empathy for ADHD children – for what they experience on a daily basis – can inspire parents and teachers to work with these children in ways that will help them grow into responsible and happy adults. She advocates the Five C’s method – self-Control, Compassion, Collaboration, Consistency and Celebration – as a roadmap for reducing family stress and equipping children with the skills they need to thrive.

A group of toddlers gathered with parents and grandparents in Adams Memorial Library in Latrobe for a session of the library’s “Wee Read” early literacy program. It was a little like herding cats for children’s director Karen Herc until she captured their attention with a round-robin activity in which each child was introduced and got a round of applause. The wee ones then settled in for a half-hour of learning made fun through simple stories, songs, activities and free play. Similar sessions take place in libraries all around the area, designed to set children on a lifelong path of reading and to help their family members or caregivers foster that love of the written word. Starting early matters.