Today’s Literacy Headlines

Preschool is an important time for children to build pro-social behaviors and learn to get along with other kids in a school setting. Recently, there has been more emphasis on academic preparation in preschool, but just as important, are the social and emotional skills kids will need to succeed when they move into kindergarten. Educare New Orleans Early Childhood School is a public pre-K that focuses on giving kids the language to talk about their emotions from an early age. Their play-based curriculum gives teachers lots of opportunities to help students build self-regulation skills. Educators here say success is when a child moves into elementary school with the self-regulation skills they need to focus and learn at the next level.

The U.S. has rich linguistic diversity with over 300 languages spoken. This linguistic diversity is evident in our nation’s public schools where close to one in ten students are English learners (ELs). Although ELs attend schools throughout the country, most ELs are concentrated in urban areas. In April, the Council of Great City Schools, a national membership organization focused on addressing the needs of K-12 public schools in urban settings, released a report centered on the EL students in their 74 member districts. Specifically, the Council surveyed districts on EL enrollment (i.e., total numbers, percentages, enrollment by school level, languages spoken, and ELs receiving special education services), academic performance, staffing, professional development, and Title III allocations. Several compelling findings emerged from the report, including that ELs are the fastest-growing student subgroup within member districts, now making up 17 percent of all student enrollment.

Reading and writing are critical, and making opportunities for children to read and write has been a calling throughout my life. I came from an impoverished community. Through reading and writing, I was able to gain scholarships and loans to attend college. Since then, I’ve always made it a point to pay it back. From donating to the Little Free Library at Lot 12 of a trailer park in rural Illinois to working with inner-city students on writing skills, I’ve seen the advances children make once provided opportunities to engage in literacy. Along the way, I’ve seen various methods of making literacy happen for students.

Schools often have trouble identifying English-language learners with learning disabilities—and most states don’t offer formal guidance to help educators diagnose and support the students. A report from the National Center on Educational Outcomes found that just nine states have publicly available manuals designed to help educators. That’s despite a 2016 recommendation from the U.S. Department of Education that states should produce clear policies and guidance to help schools distinguish between English-learners who struggle with the language and those who have learning disabilities.

An updated infographic on diversity in children’s books has been released by Sarah Park Dahlen, an associate professor of MLIS at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN, and illustrator David Huyck. While this 2018 version shows improvement in representation since 2015, the creators of the image added cracks in the mirrors to illustrate the continued misrepresentation of the underrepresented communities—the quantity of books may have gone up, but it isn’t all good news as that doesn’t necessarily indicate accuracy and quality in the titles.

Chapter 5 of “David Copperfield” begins with the grave announcement, “I Am Sent Away From Home.” David is only 7 when his hardhearted stepfather packs him off, and weeping so copiously that eventually he must spread his handkerchief on the horse’s back to dry. Anne Shirley arrives at Green Gables only to spend her first weeks dreading a return to the orphanage. The Pevensie children, evacuated from London during the Blitz, stumble into a new world through the back of a wardrobe and soon fight battles of their own. Fiction is full of children whose lives are upended when they move, tipping them into new adventures. But moving isn’t just about forging into unknown territory, as any kid knows. Moving is about what we leave behind. The spirited protagonists of four new middle-grade novels find that when they’re taken from the lives they once knew, they must reckon with their pasts as well as the future.

“My child just hates reading.” As an educational therapist, I’ve heard these words countless times from parents of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or ADD). For these kids, the act of reading itself may be mentally taxing and unenjoyable. Of course, if they also have dyslexia, it’s key that they receive phonics and fluency intervention. But many of my students have already received interventions and improved their reading skills to grade level — and still, the reading anxiety from their years of struggle remains, and their mental energy just can’t sustain the task. As an educational therapist, my approach here — in trying to reduce their reading anxiety — is to use their interests, along with available technology. Here are five strategies I’ve found to be effective in engaging students in free-time reading.

When Gia Bastien, of Towson, was a child growing up in a rural area of Maine, her parents, trying to protect their African American daughter in an overwhelmingly white state, pulled her out of school in the fourth grade. Bastien, who now lives in Loch Raven Village, said she struggled for years to catch up on what she had missed, especially in reading and literacy skills. She succeeded; she graduated just a few weeks ago from the Community College of Baltimore County and will be attending Morgan State University on a full scholarship in the fall. Despite her success, Bastien said she wants something better for her three sons. “I don’t want to see my children struggle,” she said. So, for the past three years when school ended, Bastien has taken her children to the Towson library and has them sign up for the Summer Reading Challenge. “In my household, reading is definitely important,” Bastien said.

Reading is the only activity consistently linked to summer learning (Kim and Quinn, 2013). On the surface, summer reading assignments and programs appear to address this concern—ensuring that all children will read at least a few books over the summer and head off potential learning loss. The problem? Assigning books for summer reading can’t guarantee that reading takes place and could have a negative effect on young readers’ long-term reading interest and motivation. Sending an eighth-grader home with Lord of the Flies to read over the summer is unlikely to improve their reading ability or their enthusiasm for reading. If required summer reading doesn’t really work, what does? Access to books and the ability to choose what you want to read are the two factors consistently linked to both reading achievement and the development of intrinsic reading motivation. Required summer reading presumes that all children have access to the books, computers, the Internet, or school supplies necessary to read and complete assignments, which puts our neediest children at a disadvantage from the start. The primary reason many children don’t read much over the summer is not a lack of motivation or interest. They don’t have any books to read.

When I was compiling a list of different kinds of stories, poems, horoscopes, etc. I wanted to see in my book Funny Girl, I was hoping to appeal to as wide an array of interests as possible. Sportsy kids. Kids who like real stories. Comics. You name it. And, of course, I wanted some Nonfiction in there. Unfortunately, I learned pretty quickly that if you ask a Nonfiction author to be funny on command, oftentimes that very request stumps them. And who can blame them? How do you pluck humor from reality when that reality isn’t inherently hilarious? It got me to thinking. Funny Nonfiction isn’t particularly common, but it most certainly exists. But how do you go about it? Let’s look at some of the funnier books of 2019 and see how they tackled the challenge.

Learning doesn’t have to fall by the wayside just because school is out. Use these five parent pro tips to keep your child learning and having fun over the summer months. (1) “Summer”ize your Summer Activities. After completing a fun activity with your child this summer – such as going to the zoo, park, pool, etc. – have your child tell you about it. Ask questions like: What happened? Who was there? Why was this significant? What was the most important thing that took place? The more you engage with your child and allow them to give detailed accounts of activities, the stronger their summarizing and paraphrasing skills will be once they return to school.

Did you know when parents and caregivers are involved in their children’s reading habits, the children are more likely to be frequent readers later in life? When I found this out, a light bulb went off and the Family Book Study was born. I like to think of it as a movement that bridges literacy and family togetherness. Thinking back to my own childhood, I remember reading picture books with my grandma and chapter books with my sister. Through these experiences, I saw firsthand how books can enhance family time. To get this educational family reading event off the ground, I first reached out to my daughter’s school and got the staff on board. It took shape as an evening of togetherness that meets twice a year at the school. The benefits of Family Book Study go beyond literacy development. It has helped strengthen family bonds and allowed parents to be intentional about reading quality literature with their children at home.

At Middle School 88 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, there is a security guard at the entrance, long hallways plastered with art, and students, slouching on a sofa, staring into their phones. It is a pretty typical scene. Except for Room 128. For most of this school year, the room has contained the makings for a handmade, full-size wooden boat. Specifically an Optimist, a vessel a bit over seven feet. Optis, as the boats are affectionately known, are designed for small, light bodies, or for sailors 15 years old and younger. They’re wildly popular. About 850 of them compete in the annual Optimist World Championship, which will be held next month in Antigua. In October, a group of students began the process of building the Opti in Room 128. Under the direction of Laura Botel, the program coordinator of Brooklyn Boatworks, a nonprofit after-school program, and volunteers from the organization, the students met for two hours a week. Here, they mastered new manual skills and a new vocabulary, including words like transom, daggerboard and thwart.

Third grade is a pivotal year. Up until that point, students are learning to read. When they return for fourth grade, students read in order to learn. Fourth grade texts teach content and skilled readers will gain knowledge from what they’re reading. Third grade is also the first year students in Pennsylvania take a standardized test. It’s a data point that policy makers use to evaluate how schools are performing. Some educators argue that standardized test scores aren’t a great measurement for a number of reasons; they say it’s a snapshot of a single day, and not all kids are good at taking tests. In Pittsburgh Public Schools, nearly half of students scored below proficient on last year’s state standardized test. Overall, the state’s second largest district is performing worse than the state’s average.

Tennessee’s statewide network of literacy coaches is being dismantled this month after funding for that program was not renewed in the budget proposed by Gov. Bill Lee and approved by the legislature. And the future of popular summer reading camps started four years ago under Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration is uncertain after a federal grant was pulled, even as participating children have showed gains in their reading comprehension and increased their motivation to read. Both are key components of Read to be Ready, a major initiative that launched amid fanfare in 2016 as Tennessee tried to address national test results showing that only a third of its fourth-graders were considered proficient readers. The idea was to hone in on reading development in early elementary grades with the goal of getting 75 percent of the state’s third-graders proficient by 2025. The goal remains lofty and Tennessee still has a long way to climb, but the state was encouraged last year when a one-year jump of 2.3 percent helped to get almost 37 percent of its third-graders reading on or above grade level.

There are a lot of skills necessary to succeed in school that aren’t directly about mastering content, including the ability to recognize, name and control ones emotions. The school day often comes with lots of emotion, everything from elation to frustration, which makes it the perfect place to practice self-regulation. Students must also learn and practice how to prioritize and tackle tasks for academic and life success. Executive function often develops in middle school when the skills become even more important as students juggle work from multiple classes with many deadlines. Learning how to prioritize work not only makes it feel more manageable, it also helps students use work time efficiently.

With summer approaching, many public libraries are about to look like an annual school tricky tray. Prizes, baskets of books, coupons for local businesses, and more will be on display to draw in young patrons. It’s all part of their summer reading programs. According to SLJ’s Summer Reading/Summer Learning Survey, incentives are a huge part of summer reading programs. Those who argue against offering prizes say they often work to bring families into the library to sign up for the summer program. They also get students who aren’t avid readers to participate. Drawing families to the library is clearly important.

As adults, no limits are placed upon us when we enter a library, walk through the bookstore doors or power up our Kindle App. If we do not trust our students to make these same choices, how can we expect them to grow into the readers they have the potential to be? In their recent book, Game Changer!: Book Access for All Kids, Donalyn Miller and Colby Sharp also tout the value of self-selected reading. The cited benefits include a growing sense of confidence, ownership and autonomy as both readers and learners. With more choice in books comes an increase in the amount of reading students actually do. As with any skill, the more students read, the better they are at it, leading to improved reading ability and greater achievement in other content areas. Finally, and most important to me, choice in books gives rise to lifelong readers.

When it comes to getting K–12 students fired up about summer programs, libraries often highlight contests and events to bring them through the door. With schools, however, branches shift that focus, emphasizing the impact of summer slide, and how their reading programs may mitigate the effect of being out of a classroom for months. SLJ ’s recent survey about summer programming found that 24 percent of public libraries also partner with schools over the summer, from simply getting the word out about programs to more in-depth connections.

According to a study done by the Colorado Department of Education, children in low-income households fall behind an average of 2 months in reading during the summer. And, summer slide is cumulative, with these learning losses building up each summer. The basic solution? Stay engaged in learning: read, write, do some math. I’m fully supportive of those ideas. To me, there’s nothing better than a nice glass of lemonade and a good book. I want that for our kids too. And while it may be tempting to pull out flashcards and stock up on workbooks, let’s not forget that life experience also teaches a lot. The more one’s horizons are expanded, the more we can comprehend when we read. At a loss for where to begin? Let me see if I can get you started…

Differences in summer enrichment between poor and wealthy students may not contribute much to long-term achievement gaps, according to a new analysis. Researcher Paul von Hippel set out to replicate the landmark 1982 Beginning School Study, which tracked more than 800 Baltimore schoolchildren from kindergarten through grade 8. That study found reading achievement gaps between high- and low-poverty schools widened each summer, ultimately tripling the size of their reading gaps from the start of primary school to the end of middle school in 1990. However, those results disappeared when von Hippel tried to replicate the study using newer tests, which use different formats and control for the difficulty of test items in ways that the earlier tests did not, adapting the difficulty of test questions as students move through the assessment. More generally, expanded learning time has been associated with better achievement. In separate research, von Hippel and his colleagues found that schools that attempt to relieve summer learning loss by more evenly spacing their 180 school days across the year are not associated with narrowed achievement gaps, However, schools that expanded their traditional school calendar to 210 days—often including some summer school or Saturdays—were associated with better achievement.

How important is summer programming to the lives of communities and their families? Extremely, a new survey from SLJ shows. These public library services meet the needs of children and families with programming ranging from robotics to summer meals to ever-popular reading challenges. Across the country, 97 percent of all public libraries increase their youth programming in the summer months, according to the 773 librarians who responded to our national survey. Their facilities, of varying sizes, serve 106,300 people on average across the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West, in urban, suburban, small town, and rural settings. Survey topics encompassed summer programming, including funding, partnerships, and incentives. The most-offered programs across the board in 2018 reflected a mix of reading, art, tech, and outdoor focus.

The students knew that today they would begin studying the format and structures of graphic novels and they were eager to dive in. We spent the next six days of one-hour reading workshop sessions in a graphic novel bootcamp. Each day, students engaged with a specific set of teacher-designed inquiry lessons that explored the elements of art, design, and story that are consistent with the graphic novel. The request to begin an inquiry into the format of graphic novels and their features came from teachers who recognized that the narrative structures, visual images, and design features offered in elementary literature were growing more complex. They also recognized that the publishing trends that were emerging in children’s literature were placing increased literacy demands upon strengthening a visual culture that included illustrated books, graphic novels, and visual narratives. Likewise, these texts were bringing new challenges to teachers who desired rigorous reading skills and strategies for their students. The teachers felt they had a responsibility, and desire, to foster new approaches in helping their readers navigate these changes.

A mounting body of evidence indicates that technology in schools isn’t boosting student achievement as its proponents had hoped it would. The latest research comes from the Reboot Foundation, which released a study in June 2019 that shows a negative connection between a nation’s performance on international assessments and 15-year-olds’ self-reported use of technology in school. The more students used technology in schools, the lower the nation ranked in educational achievement. In the United States, the results were more complicated. For younger school children, the study found a negative tie between the use of tablets in school and fourth-grade reading scores. Fourth-grade students who reported using tablets in “all or almost all” classes scored 14 points lower on the reading portion of a test administered by the federal government than students who reported “never” using classroom tablets. That’s the equivalent of a year of education or an entire grade level. Meanwhile, some types of computer usage among older students could be beneficial.

In my teenage years, I worked at my local library as a page—a romantic-sounding title that calls to mind polishing armor and mucking out stables but in reality consists of reshelving returned books and mucking out the library’s guinea pig tank. (Rest in peace, Fireball, you furry little terror.) As minimum wage gigs go, paging was a dream, especially during summers, when the children’s department would announce its annual summer reading program theme, and I would add an accompanying T-shirt to my growing collection with the year’s motto: “Make a Splash @ Your Library.” “One World, Many Stories.” “Fizz, Boom, Read.” I learned later, though it now seems obvious, that those themes were not exclusive to my little neighborhood library of Fanwood, New Jersey: They were chosen by the Collaborative Summer Library Program. The CSLP was started in 1987 by 10 Minnesota libraries that banded together to create an annual unified, themed children’s summer reading program. It has since expanded throughout the country and around the world.

When Jarrett Lerner offered to mail a stack of books to a class of kids to take home for the summer, he didn’t expect the response. More than 1,000 teachers raised their hands. The educators told Lerner they had been using their own paychecks to get books for their kids, many of whom lived in so-called book deserts, where children don’t have easy access to books. “The kids who are at the greatest disadvantage or struggling the most in other areas also have the least access to books,” says Lerner, author of “The Enginerds.” Lerner was inspired to use the #kidsneedbooks hashtag by his friend, the author Ann Braden, who was giving away a stack from her own shelf. Lerner jumped in with his own giveaway and soon a movement was born. Since then, Lerner has given away a stack a month, and played matchmaker for classrooms in need and potential donors.

Joan Aiken’s favorite literary terrain was the blurred border where nineteenth-century realism begins to slip into folklore and fantasy. This is a realm of absurd stock characters and hoary narrative devices: cruel governesses, kindhearted orphans, counterfeit wills, hidden passageways, long-lost relations, doppelgängers, clues hidden in paintings, castaways, coincidences, sudden returns from the dead. But instead of abashedly sneaking in one or two of these elements, as another writer might do, Aiken piled them one atop the other, in the same teetering plots. In America, I hardly ever meet anyone who knows who she is; when I do, we feel like members of a secret club. (She wrote about secret clubs.) Yet her imitators, conscious or not, are everywhere. Any children’s book with a cover that either looks like or is an Edward Gorey drawing is probably Aikenesque. Her novels are a gift, for children and adults. She harnessed her wild imagination to her marvelously pragmatic intelligence. The result was books that revel in both the fundamental insanity of fiction and the mysterious sanity that sometimes results from reading it.

Ithaca South Elementary School kindergarten teacher Sue Meier has always been committed to promoting early childhood literacy. Two decades ago she came up with an idea that has allowed her and her students to do just that. That’s when her “Books for Babies” project was born. “In 1999, I heard about grants from the Youth Advisory Council of the Gratiot County Community Foundation,” Meier said. “We applied and received a $500 grant to purchase books. After that first delivery I wanted to continue the project.” She and her students have. What began as a community service project is now in its 20th year of annually providing books to newborns at MidMichigan Medical Center in Alma. “It addresses the importance of family literacy, reading to infants and doing community service,” Meier explained. The children have gained experience in all areas of our curriculum by participating in the project.”

A common complaint in the early-childhood field is that several different entities exist to support young children and their families, but those organizations often don’t work together. But in a number of communities across the country, schools, districts, and early-childhood providers have come together to dismantle those organizational silos. For example, Cherry Park Elementary School in Portland, Ore., a part of the 9,700-student David Douglas district, runs a summer kindergarten transition program to prepare young students for school, supports a home-visiting program, operates a food bank, and offers cooking classes and financial literacy programs. This effort and many more are catalogued in the report “All Children Learn and Thrive: Building First 10 Schools and Communities” by David Jacobson, a principal technical adviser for the Education Development Center.

In Michigan’s largest district, 20% of third graders — nearly 800 students — would have been held back last year had Michigan’s tough literacy law been in place. That’s well above the 4% percent of third graders who typically have to repeat the grade in the district. The data provides a picture of what the district could experience during the coming school year, when schools across the state will have to comply with the law that requires schools to hold back third graders whose scores on the state’s standardized exam indicate they are more than one year behind in reading. Michigan lawmakers adopted the retention law in 2016 to spur improvement in literacy. Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti noted that the district’s work in the past two years has been to develop better systems for improving early literacy that has included training on standards, a new literacy curriculum, a tool to identify struggling readers, and intervention.

Zara is a curious young Muslim girl with curly brown hair whose grandmother bakes delicious treats in the kitchen. Her mother is a doctor. Her aunt is an artist who rocks pink and purple hair. Her cousin in high school does karate. Each of the women in Hena Khan’s children’s book lives a full life, and each wears a hijab. Zara’s mother wears a bright pink headscarf that contrasts with her white doctor coat; her aunt’s is turban-style. Her cousin’s is the fitted, athletic type. Ms. Khan, a Pakistani American author born and raised in Maryland, started writing children’s books more than a decade ago at a time when depictions of authentic Muslim characters were few. She wanted to be sure that children like her sons, now both teenagers, could find books that represented them. Now she finds herself part of a growing community of Muslim writers.

As you and your students celebrate the end of the school year, we offer you a collection of links designed to keep you and the children and young adults in your life happily reading over the next several months. We will continue to post new entries through the end of June, when we take our own summer vacation, so you can expect to discover new titles and teaching ideas with us for the next few weeks. But first, we begin with links to the books that we blogged about over the last year that have won recent awards and honors in the field of children’s and young adult literature. We invite you to explore our previously written blog entries for these winners and honor books. The following awards announced each spring are included in this post.

Mississippi’s third-graders take an English Language Arts test that measures their reading proficiency as defined by the state’s rigorous academic standards. This assessment is a critical tool to help educators understand where students are struggling, where learning gaps exist and whether students are performing at, above or below grade level. Many of the students I work with have more serious concerns outside of school that often greatly impact their academic performance. To provide this support to our third-graders, my colleagues and I challenge ourselves to think about what we can do for them outside our regular lessons and what strategies we can implement to prepare their mindsets for the test. Just as I learned that gardening requires more than simply watering plants, nurturing students so they can do their best requires a variety of approaches.

The “summer slide” has nothing to do with a fun summer pastime. Instead, it’s a term used to describe the tendency for students to decline in achievement gains during the summer months when school is not in session. This phenomenon is especially prominent among students from low-income families who often lack access to books over summer break. Luckily, there are many ways to prevent the summer slide. Giving children access to books plays a critical role in warding off summer learning loss. When students keep reading, they keep learning. Here are 7 tips for parents and caregivers to help keep children engaged in reading during the summer months.

All right, folks. Time for a round-up. We’re almost halfway through the year, so why not take a gander at some of the great graphic novels/comics for kids out so far (or about to come out)? You know I love my round-up posts, and what could be better than rounding up some seriously eclectic titles? I have read a LOT of 2019 comics so far. These are the eighteen that I’ve enjoyed the most.

In my many decades of critiquing special education evaluations, IEPs, and progress reports from various New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware schools, and in speaking to innumerable parents, teachers and other IEP team members, I’ve gained an overwhelming impression: Little, if any, valid progress monitoring occurs. Instead, many special education teachers and case managers rely primarily on their subjective memories to judge their students’ progress. Explicit and goal-directed, highly personalized statements of progress for each struggling reader can reduce the workloads of teachers and case managers while giving them, parents, and other personnel the critical progress monitoring information they need to understand if the teacher or IEP team needs to quickly revise or replace an unsuccessful program. Quickly revising or replacing unsuccessful programs helps prevent the common trap of keeping struggling readers in programs that intensify their academic, social, and emotional struggles.

Each summer, students can lose up to three months of learning, according to research collected by the nonprofit think tank, RAND Corporation. This phenomenon, often known as “summer slide,” particularly impacts low-income students, who may not have access to the same enrichment opportunities and extracurriculars as wealthier peers. One solution favored by school districts: summer programs that focus on academics, often geared toward underperforming students. Yet these programs draw little interest from parents and students, and therefore low enrollment and attendance, says a new report-slash-toolkit on summer literacy programs from EAB, an education research and consulting group. For the report, researchers led by Maria Wahlstrom, an EAB consultant, conducted more than 200 interviews with districts and dug into what those with successful summer programs learned, and what they needed to change.

In the children’s and YA book world, award season, capped by the American Library Association Youth Media Awards (YMAs), is a whirlwind of activity, celebrating literature and recognizing the best of the best for young people. For the past 31 years, School Library Journal has worked in tandem with the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) to sponsor one such initiative—the Margaret A. Edwards Award (MAE)—which is unique in its scope and criteria. It honors an author as well as specific titles that have stood the test of time and made a “significant and lasting” contribution to young adult literature. In so doing, the award recognizes an author’s work in providing young adults with “a window through which they can view their world and which help them to grow and to understand themselves and their role in society.” In selecting M.T. Anderson as the 2019 Margaret Edwards Award recipient, this year’s MAE committee cited Feed; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party ; and Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves (all published by Candlewick Press) as such powerful titles.

Writers for young children have a nearly impossible task: to amuse both the kid being read to and the adult doing the reading. Doing one or the other is hard enough, and only a select handful of geniuses can manage both. William Steig is one. His books are silly and sweet, as books for children should be, but they are also unsettling, strange, and sometimes scary. Beauty and dread coexist; there is whimsy, even silliness, but also palpable anxiety, peril, and despair in Steig’s world—or maybe this is just the real world. Despite the jaunty animal protagonists and inexplicable magic, Steig seems to me to be one of the more realist of writers for children.

By the time Hans and Margret Rey went to the bicycle shop, the only one left was a bicycle built for two. It was June 11, 1940, in Paris. The radio was announcing that the city would not be defended from the approaching Nazi army. The couple didn’t have a car; none of the trains were running; two million Parisians had already fled. Hans and Margret tried out the tandem bike but realized that they couldn’t manage. They instead bought spare bicycle parts, which cost them as much as they had been paying for a month’s lodging at a nice hotel—the manic inflation of exodus. Hans somehow built two bicycles that night. The couple left the next morning porting some food, a little clothing, and the drawings for a children’s book about a perilously curious monkey.

For all the academic steps forward students take during the school year, the summer slide causes many of them to slide a few steps back come summer time. Valley of the Sun United Way is taking strides to combat this all-too-common “summer slide,” and they’re hoping that, by broadening the availability of books for young readers, local students will become that much more likely to pick one up and dive in. Dubbed “Open a Book, Enter the Universe,” the United Way’s new program seeks to prevent the loss of academic skills that often occurs between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Targeted at kids in preschool through fourth grade, the program is making it easier than ever for local youths who read just 20 minutes a day to earn free books in either English or Spanish. Active participants can also attend an end-of-summer celebration where they can earn even more complimentary books to take home. Here are seven suggestions for keeping kids active – and actively engaged – throughout the summer:

A Rhode Island dyslexia advocacy group is pushing for sweeping education reforms including early screening, specific curriculum and trained specialists. The Providence Journal reports that the legislation has been proposed by Decoding Dyslexia Rhode Island, an advocacy group of parents and teachers. The bill would implement dyslexia screening for kindergartners and mandate that students with dyslexia be taught using a research-based curriculum called structured literacy, with at least one reading specialist per school trained to teach it.