Today’s Literacy Headlines

Racial disparity in academic achievement remains one of the leading problems in American education, both at the K-12 and the college level. A number of studies show greater diversity in the teaching profession can address some of those concerns. Here’s a look at a teacher training program that is aiming to increase diversity in the classroom and improve results all the way through college. Francisco Martinez will earn his teaching certificate this month, but the 26-year-old teacher-to-be wants to be more to his students. His goal is to be a good role model. Martinez, who was born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, says that his own teachers in school were overwhelmingly white. He hopes his background will resonate with elementary school students in Fresno, California, where the district’s enrollment is 67 percent Hispanic.

Be it for school or just running errands, thousands of children and their parents wait for the bus every day. A pilot program in Pennsylvania is trying to squeeze a little more science, technology, engineering, and math learning into those waits. In the Urban Thinkscape project in Philadelphia, researchers and local architects built spatial and science-related art at neighborhood bus stops in Philadelphia, including spatial puzzle walls, patterns of footsteps for jumping, or pictures containing hidden objects and shapes. Prior studies have suggested children who talk more about math outside of school do the same in class, and that play and simple prompts can increase such conversation.

Less than 1 in 5 general education teachers feel “very well prepared” to teach students with mild to moderate learning disabilities, including ADHD and dyslexia, according to a new survey from two national advocacy groups. The survey found that only 30 percent of general education teachers feel “strongly” that they can successfully teach students with learning disabilities—and only 50 percent believe those students can reach grade-level standards. Overall, the findings depict a teaching corps that considers itself ill-equipped to meet the needs of millions of children with disabilities in the nation’s public K-12 schools and clings to misconceptions about student learning and attention issues. In compiling their report, the two groups—National Center for Learning Disabilities and Understood.org—surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,350 teachers; convened teacher focus groups in California, Ohio, and North Carolina; researched teacher certification requirements in all 50 states; and distilled the findings from 150 academic articles to learn more about effective teaching methods for students with disabilities.

There are no workbooks, and the subject matter focuses on things like swimming and pizza that are sure to capture kids’ attention. The atmosphere is fun, and the environment is casual. But the mission is serious — to prevent summertime academic regression that can cost a child later in life. The Horizons program at Ashley Hall is one of several local initiatives designed to combat the “summer slide” — the tendency for students to lose some academic gains made over the previous school year. It’s not just a theory; kids most at risk can fall two years behind in their reading level by fifth grade, according to the nonprofit Children’s Literacy Initiative.

In 2013, I wrote a Literacy Daily post about a new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment then in development—the Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL) assessment. I was excited about the TEL because, unlike the biannual NAEP reading assessment, the TEL promised to tell us something about U.S. students’ 21st-century digital literacies—such as their ability “to employ technologies and media to find, evaluate, analyze, organize, and synthesize information from different sources.” The TEL was first administered nationwide in 2014, and then again four years later in 2018. The 2018 results are now available, and together with the 2014 results, and side-by-side with the NAEP reading assessment data, they make for interesting reading. It serves as a reminder of what has been true all along—that reading takes many forms, that we need to keep revisiting and expanding our definitions of literacy, and that single assessments tend to give only a partial picture of what our students know and can do. Following are some highlights.

Measuring achievement gaps between rich and poor might seem like a straightforward exercise for education experts. Simply look up the test scores for rich kids and subtract the tests scores for poor kids. But despite this apparent simplicity, two prominent education researchers have arrived at different answers. Sean Reardon says that achievement gaps have grown a whopping 40 percent in the last 50 years. Eric Hanushek says they haven’t budged. Reardon, a sociologist, says the growing achievement gaps he has found stem from increasing income inequality in our society and the decisions of many rich parents to invest more in their kids, from private tutors to after-school programs. Hanushek, an economist, believes that the inability to close the achievement gap shows the failure of our education policies to help the poor, especially the $26 billion a year the federal government spends on Title I funding on poor schools and for Head Start preschool programs.

Are too many black and Hispanic students incorrectly diagnosed with disabilities and sent to special education classes, where they run the risk of receiving a substandard education? Federal policy is built around the idea that this problem of “disproportionality” exists and that school districts need to actively guard against it. Newer research has countered the idea that some minority groups are overidentified for special education. Instead, this research states that black and Hispanic students are actually less likely to be enrolled in special education than white peers with similar academic achievement and behavior, meaning that those minority students may be missing out on the help they need to succeed. Now, a new study, looking at a decade’s worth of student records in Florida, offers additional nuance to the debate. The study showed that overall, black and Hispanic students are identified for special education at lower rates than white students who are otherwise similar to them. That fits in with the latest findings. But where those students attend school seemed to play a large role.

Of all the picture books about children exploring the wild outdoors for fun, only a scarce few feature African American kids as protagonists. In children’s literature, every reader needs “window stories” and “mirror stories,” says Michelle Martin, Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor for Children and Youth Services at the University of Washington. “Mirrors to be able to see themselves, and windows to be able to see the lives of other people who maybe don’t look like [them].” Those stories are key to developing empathy, she said. Martin hopes that one day, young readers will look into their proverbial “mirrors” and out their proverbial “windows” and see more kids and families of color exploring the wonders of the natural world.

When colleagues at the Nashville Public Library (NPL) asked Elizabeth Atack and Klem-Mari Cajigas if they could adapt their Bringing Books to Life! family literacy workshops for incarcerated teen dads at a local youth detention facility, the two women didn’t hesitate to say yes. But they knew right away their current program wasn’t going to work. Quickly, Atack and Cajigas saw the young men were enthusiastic about books. “We really took those components—their interest in their children and how they could support their children, their enthusiasm for books and that background knowledge for media creation…” As the young men searched through the book collection and read the books looking for just the right one to record, the women spoke informally about early literacy and helped the teens see what “assets” they already had to help their children. They also discussed more than literacy. The young fathers asked questions about early childhood behavior and development. By the end of the four weeks, they had literacy information plus their recording burned onto a CD which was placed into a new copy of the book with a bookplate that had an inscription for their child. It was put with their personal belongings to be given to the child on a visitation day or upon their release.

Horn Book editor-in-chief Roger Sutton announced the winners of the 2019 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards at SLJ’s Day of Dialog at the New York School of Medicine today. The picture book winner was The Patchwork Bike by Maxine Beneba Clarke, illustrated by Van Thanh Rudd. The nonfiction winner was This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality by Jo Ann Allen Boyce and Debbie Levy. The fiction winner was The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon. First awarded in 1967, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards honor excellence in literature for children and young adults.

Creative Kids Learning Center in Northwest Seattle is cheaper than most preschools in the neighborhood. That’s because Creative Kids is one of 20 preschools that has joined a city program that not only offers reduced fees, but also mandates class size, length of school day, and curriculum in exchange for higher pay, training, and tuition assistance for teachers. In the absence of adequate federal and state funding, Seattle is building a top-ranked preschool program by subsidizing tuition on its own. Who’s footing the bill? Taxpayers. And a broad majority are doing so willingly. Five years ago, Seattle residents voted for a ballot measure to raise property taxes, generating $58 million to fund an overhaul of existing preschools, some of which are run by nonprofits or out of homes, and create new ones.

When Whitney Hamilton looks back on her days as a teacher, she remembers a stark divide between the students who kept sharpening their minds over the summer and those who didn’t. Students with resources, such as an abundance of books in their homes, returned to school in the fall “ready to dig back into the learning,” she said. Then there were the students who didn’t have those learning experiences – students who actually started off the school year behind due to a phenomenon called summer slide. That’s when students forget over the summer the skills and content they mastered during the previous school year. Now an elementary literacy consultant with the Kentucky Department of Education, Hamilton recommends parents take simple steps to reduce summer slide. Research shows, according to the department, that students on average lose two months of mathematics and reading learning during summer vacation. “Learning can happen very authentically,” Hamilton said, stressing strategies that parents can adopt and use at home.

When we think about speaking and listening standards, many of us count on accountable talks or literacy circles, those often used after the completion of a read-aloud or shared text, where students sit in a circle and talk with guidance from a teacher or, if they are experienced, without that guidance. In these conversations, it is usually our strongest verbal students who drive the direction of the thinking, often leaving out or leaving behind students who require more time to process and share. Not only have I been frustrated that my conversations may only involve a handful of students, but I have also found it challenging to teach developing speakers how to listen—really listen—to what others are saying and to build off that rather than throw another idea into the mix. To address this challenge, which many other teachers experience, I introduced a way of sharing ideas without ever opening your mouth and instead opening your marker cap. Quiet conversations can be used with a range of texts, from excerpts from primary sources to book blurbs to introduce and build excitement for book clubs. Following is a series of steps to spark quiet conversations.

Most years, in the school where I work, our second grade students embark on a bird study. Reading, research, field trips, and a culminating activity are all part of the work. Almost every child who participates becomes a dedicated birder, as do their family members, and every new book purchased on the subject gets borrowed immediately. Even though we’re city folk, when spring arrives many of us wake up to the sounds of birds chirping; lately those chirps and tweets have me thinking about placing my next order of bird books. Here are some of the titles you’ll find on my list.

California is considering overhauling a test intended to measure whether prospective teachers are prepared to be effective reading instructors. That’s because the test, known as the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, or RICA, is outdated, and there is no evidence that it contributes to more effective instruction. The test hasn’t been revised since 2009 when it was aligned to the English Language Arts-English Language Development Framework put in place two years earlier to guide instruction in classrooms. Frameworks are blueprints for teachers and schools to use to implement state-adopted content standards in different subject areas. When a new English Language Arts framework was adopted in 2014 the test was never revised to reflect the changes. “In failing to align with the current standards and framework, the RICA does not reflect current research and instructional best practices in literacy,” said Mimi Miller, a professor from Chico State University, who is part of a literacy expert group convened by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing to offer recommendations on the skills and knowledge prospective teachers need to teach reading and literacy.

By the time many students reach middle school, they no longer have books read aloud to them at home or at school. But research shows benefits of hearing books read aloud, including improved comprehension, reduced stress, and expanded exposure to different types of materials. For five minutes of each class period, I read aloud to my middle school students. I’m often asked how I “give up time” each day to read, but the five minutes are a gift to my students. Spending this time each day enriches the classroom community, allows me to share a love of reading, enhances my language arts instruction, and exposes students to new authors, genres, and themes.

Summer for young children is a time for play dates, fun-in-the-sun, and fun-filled days of doing not much of anything, but summer should also be a time filled with learning. Just because school is not in session for most kids does not mean that learning should not be taking place. On the contrary, summer is a time kids can learn from experiences beyond classroom walls and without formal assessments and rigidity. Imagine for just one moment that you have the opportunity to be the teacher to the open, imaginative, wandering mind of your child wanting to do nothing more than simply have a summer of fun. You can combat the summer slide by encouraging your child to devote a small bit of time each day to keeping up the skills they learned during the school year.

Researchers estimate as many as one in five children have dyslexia. But many school districts identify less than 5% of their students as having it. They also don’t test all students for potential reading disorders. And many have avoided the word “dyslexia” altogether. Montgomery County is one of these districts, but it’s far from the only one. Experts in teaching students with reading disorders say what parents and students experience in Montgomery County is a common occurrence across the country. When schools don’t proactively screen for serious issues, they say it can lead to more students going undiagnosed and untreated, falling further and further behind. This could soon change, at least in Maryland. Last week, Gov. Larry Hogan signed a new law — one championed by parents of students with dyslexia — that requires schools to screen for students at risk of developing reading disorders and provide support.

Krumulus, a small bookstore in Germany, has everything a kid could want: parties, readings, concerts, plays, puppet shows, workshops and book clubs. On a recent Saturday afternoon, a hush fell in the bright, airy “reading-aloud” room as Sven Wallrodt, one of the store’s employees, stood up to speak. Brandishing a newly published illustrated children’s book about the life of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, he looked at the crowd of eager, mostly school-aged children and their parents. “Welcome to this book presentation,” he said. “If you fall asleep, snore quietly.” Everyone laughed, but no one fell asleep. An hour later, the children followed Wallrodt down to the bookstore’s basement workshop, where he showed them how Gutenberg fit leaden block letters into a metal plate. Then the children printed their own bookmark using a technique similar to Gutenberg’s, everyone was thrilled.

Chicago’s Open Books — a 13-year-old non-profit dedicated to children’s literacy — aims to put books into every child’s hands citywide, starting at birth. The group, which sells donated books online and from two bookstores to raise money for its literacy programs, has partnered with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to expand its reach to children who most need libraries of their own. In just a few months, Open Books has enrolled nearly 1,000 children into the program. The process behind the Imagination Library is simple. Parents or guardians fill out a form to sign up their children — even as early as a child’s due date — to have a free book mailed to each child every month, from birth to age 5. This means a child can receive up to 60 books, chosen by a group of early education experts, before he or she enters kindergarten.

Neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki says exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain, and she is on a mission to help her students and the public understand the “life-changing,” mood-boosting, cognitive-enhancing effects of physical activity. Suzuki encourages people to think about the brain like a muscle. Exercise strengthens both the prefrontal cortex (which is involved in executive functioning) and the hippocampus (which plays a key role in memory and learning). In this way, exercise supports our ability to think creatively, make decisions, focus and retrieve key information. In her research, Suzuki found a single workout can improve a student’s ability to focus on a task for up to two hours. She argues that movement breaks in K-12 classrooms support the deep kind of learning that they should be striving for.

Children from low-income and minority families will be more likely to flunk than wealthier white classmates with similarly low test scores under Michigan’s third-grade reading law, if the experience of Florida is repeated here. Florida implemented a third-grade retention policy for children not reading at grade level nearly two decades ago, in 2002. That policy ‒ which, like Michigan’s, provides loopholes for some students ‒ is markedly similar to Michigan’s read-or-flunk law that goes into effect next school year. A soon-to-be-published study by researchers at the American Institutes for Research and Northwestern University found that Florida third-graders with similarly low reading scores were held back at different rates, depending on the socioeconomic status of their families.

After Arkansas parent Kim Head discovered her kindergarten son had dyslexia, her search for curriculum that would address his learning disability highlighted the shortcomings in the education system’s approach to reading — the work she did with him at home improved both his self-esteem and academic work. The experience led Head to form an alliance with other families facing the same struggle, advocating for changes in reading instruction that included asking for new laws requiring the incorporation of phonics.

Many teachers and parents do not know the pedagogy behind inclusive instruction. Inclusion is not about throwing disabled children into general education classrooms without support or tools and leaving teachers to clean up the resultant chaos. Schools don’t meet anyone’s needs when they integrate thoughtlessly. Inclusion, by definition, involves carefully assessing a child’s needs and then implementing a strategic plan to support that child within the general classroom setting. This is done by a special education team, rather than one general education teacher. The team offers options such as teacher training, team-teaching, pushed-in special education instruction, classroom accommodations (a standing desk, computer workstation, etc.), an interpreter, or a classroom assistant added to the room for portions of the day.

A California company founded by game-developer parents who wanted to help their special-needs son is sharing a $10 million XPRIZE award with a London-based educational nonprofit for programs created to teach illiterate children how to teach themselves to read. The Berkeley-based Kitkit School and London’s onebillion educational nonprofit were declared co-winners of the XPRIZE For Global Learning. The goal was to develop open-sourced software, put it on tablets donated by Google and have thousands of children in 170 remote villages in Tanzania test it. They had to develop programs filled with games that could grab children’s attention and then, like teachers do, use drawings, letters, numbers and sounds to teach them to teach themselves to read, write and do arithmetic.

Too often, teachers are presented with new strategies and not given the time and support to unlearn their old practices. For Margaret Goldberg, realizing there was a better way to teach students how to read was transformational. After working as a 4th grade teacher for a half-dozen years, she became a literacy coach and reading interventionist for 1st graders. She taught the students reading behaviors, such as guessing words based on context, meaning, and picture clues. But the students were still struggling to read. Goldberg began researching reading instruction and determined that students needed to learn how to crack the alphabetic code through phonics, which explicitly teaches how letters represent speech sounds. That realization kick-started an unlearning journey—a process that resulted in gains for students but also prompted feelings of guilt. “Once I actually learned how to teach children how to read, I thought about all the kids who I hadn’t helped,” she said. “If I had known what I know now, I could have really accelerated them. … I didn’t know how to support them.” Goldberg, an early-literacy lead in the Oakland, Calif., school district, now coaches teachers on evidence-based reading instruction. She said every teacher is different in terms of the unlearning journey—some are ready to embrace a new form of instruction, and others are more resistant to change.

This year’s Collaborative Summer Library Program reading theme, A Universe of Stories, offers unlimited opportunities to connect with students and to build community. This summer is also the 50th anniversary of the July 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. As you include related fiction and nonfiction titles on your summer reading lists, consider adding a listening guide that explores the theme and anniversary through podcasts. New research provides compelling reasons to recommend them, and our curated lists will get you, your students, and their families started.

Nearly 60 years ago, a handful of 3- and 4-year-old black children living in a small city outside of Detroit attended a preschool program known as the Perry Preschool Project. The children were part of an experiment to see if a high-quality educational experience in a child’s early years could raise IQ scores. Kids’ IQ scores went up initially, but soon evened out with those of their peers. The same thing has happened more recently with the standardized test scores of children who attend preschool: They got a boost in kindergarten and then saw that boost fade as they grew older. But the Perry research didn’t stop when the initial academic benefit seemed to dissipate, nor was IQ the only thing the researchers tracked. Led for the last decade by Nobel Laureate James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, the Perry researchers have also looked at school success in terms of persistence to graduation, work success in terms of job retention and life success in terms of physical health and healthy relationships. Perry Preschool children did better on all of these measures than a randomly selected group of their peers who did not attend the preschool. The latest results from this long-running study, released on May 14, 2019, indicate that the children of the now 50- to 55-year old Perry participants reaped the same benefits.

Summer vacation is just around the corner. While most students take a break from school, experts say it’s important to keep books in the hands of learners. The loss of reading skills over the summer can build up over time, resulting in lower reading proficiency as students progress through their schooling years. Lori Helman with the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development explains what summer reading loss is and how parents and educators can work together to help children overcome it.

The Fund for the School District of Philadelphia has awarded grants to 10 district elementary school to enhance literacy instruction for students in kindergarten through third grades. The “Good to Great” grants range from $20,000 to nearly $75,000 are funded by the William Penn Foundation. The Good to Great program enhances the District’s early literacy strategy and supports individual schools in continuously improving their early literacy outcomes through targeted initiatives that meet school specific needs. The grants are designed to overcome limited resources to help school tackle challenges faced by specific student populations. The funded initiatives have a particular focus on grade-level proficiency by third grade.

Compared with the past, the majority of young adults don’t read for pleasure. It’s not that they can’t. It’s that they choose not to. So how do we open the door? How do we help them grow into readers who seek information, get lost in a story and dig deep for the themes that make great literature so powerful? It comes down to one simple caveat: give them a reason to read. For Penny, it’s about connection and community. It’s imperative that we meet them where they are. If that means they’re reading “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” for the nth time, so be it. The decision to read something else must be their own. But that doesn’t mean we sit back, twiddle our thumbs and wait for the magic to strike. This is where the reading community becomes an essential part of the solution. Book by book, we build authority with kids—offering them compelling stories of courage, books that give them a peek into lives other than their own, or in some cases, connecting with the lives they’re living.

The OECD recently issued its new book-length report, “Measuring Innovation in Education 2019.” The authors use the PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS databases to look at changes in a slew of instructional and system practices across the OECD nations between 2006 and 2016. Amidst the jargon and complicated charts, there are a number of interesting takeaways. Today, I’ll take a look at what they found with regards to reading instruction. The vast majority of the findings on reading are for fourth-graders. First off, despite energetic Common Core-inspired efforts to change how the U.S. teaches English language arts (ELA), there was little evident change between 2006 and 2016 when it came to key ELA practices in U.S. schools. Second, for better or worse, between 2006 and 2016, there was a clear OECD-wide shift toward giving students less choice over reading. Third, the U.S. massively outpaced the OECD norm when it came to fourth-graders reporting that they “use computers to write stories and texts at least once a week.” Finally, relative to the international community, the U.S. has declined in the role of teacher aides but increased in the amount of time teachers spend one-on-one with struggling students.

Teacher education programs have a responsibility to prepare candidates to effectively incorporate instructional technologies in the classroom. Although considered tech-savvy, many preservice teachers’ expertise remains in social networking. Thus, preservice teachers need frequent opportunities for experiential learning with instructional technology to design purposeful use of technology for learning outcomes. In my literacy education courses at Furman University, I embed technology practices into assignments to expose preservice teachers to meaningful real-world interactions with students in addition to their required face-to-face classroom field experiences. For example, we have used a variety of platforms such as Lino, Edmodo, and Kidblog to engage in digital book clubs with elementary learners. This real-world experience provided the preservice teachers with opportunities to practice assessing readers’ comprehension.

Last year at a literacy workshop, fifth-grade teacher Rick Darst was speaking with colleagues from another school in the Livingston, NJ, district where he works and heard about their lunch book club. It was kept small by asking kids to apply to be included, and there was a field trip connected to the theme. “Ours is kind of a riff off of theirs,” says Darst, who immediately began planning with Mt. Pleasant Elementary’s library media specialist Lenore Piccoli. The two took the same theme as their district colleagues: “Books that had to do with people immigrating, moving, being forced out of their home,” says Darst. “One of the main reasons we chose it was because it was a big topic in the news—immigration, refugees,” he says. “The other reason—and when I say this, I’m not putting any judgment on it, it’s just a fact—our kids kind of live in a bubble. So they’re not always aware that there are people out there who live different lives than they do; that there are people who struggle in other ways than they might struggle. That’s important, I think. It’s why we should be reading, to get outside of our own world, out from under our dome. We all live under a dome of one kind or another. Reading is an experience. You get to experience another way of living.”

Music lends itself incredibly well to cross-curricular connections. Which leads me to the activity I designed for my second- and third-graders at the British international school where I teach in Cologne, Germany: Telling stories with music. For this project, I invited them, in small groups, to a write three-sentence story accompanied by music. They wrote the stories, chose the instruments and incorporated the musical elements they had learned. Borrowing a common technique from literacy lessons, I decided to give the children prompts to help get their ideas flowing.

Many studies show that when parents get involved with early literacy, a child is better prepared for school—and life. That’s why North Liberty (Iowa) Community Library developed a monthly podcast aimed at busy, expecting families. Caregivers can learn about the literacy skills kids need to succeed—such as phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and print motivation—whenever and wherever they can.

Little Doctor is a specialist in crocodiles, as we can see from the enormous green patients who flock to her examination room (which, shhhh, may just be a backyard office). She ministers to them with deep concentration, applying long bandages and tender, expert care — and cures them all except a toughie called Big Mean, who refuses to unclasp her jaws. There’s a scary trip inside the beast’s mouth, and a happy ending involving the adorable hatchlings Big Mean was of course carrying in there. With its softly detailed, virtuoso art and a perfectly wrought story full of heart and respect for the imaginative rules of children’s play, this debut shines.

From a newborn’s first wail, the brain acts like a sponge, absorbing every sensory experience, the good and the bad. What will help one child get past ugly experiences and keep another mired in them, childhood experts say, is the strength of a human bond formed early in life. It’s the same bond that helps build a strong neural network where language develops. Sovanary Heang, who’s the mother of three, says reading books to them helped her form that bond with her children — now 18, 12 and 5 years old. When she took her new baby for a wellness visit at a Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia clinic, the pediatrician handed her a book and talked about the importance of reading to her child. The pediatrician said the family would continue getting brand-new books if they kept coming back for wellness visits. The program is called Reach Out and Read. It was founded by two Boston pediatricians in 1989 and is now nationwide at 6,200 clinic-based sites.

We live in a golden age of bad writing instruction. Learning to write for school was never a great path to excellent writing, but now that we have added learning to write for a standardized test, things have gotten even worse. The internet is a blooming garden of terrible writing, 150 word articles that have been stretched to 1,000 so that readers will have to click through more ad-displaying pages. What is a writing teacher to do? I’ve discussed some obstacles that have to be removed in order for real writing instruction to flourish in a classroom, but what positive steps can a writing teacher take? After thirty-nine years teaching in a classroom and writing in the world, these are the ideas that became the foundation of my practice. Here are eight rules about writing for teachers to internalize and make part of their practice.

Imagine a community where every child is ready to learn by the time they reach kindergarten. United Way of Kenosha County shares this dream and wants to make it a reality. Children begin learning right from birth, so we need to help them, along with their parents and caregivers, form habits that will help them become successful in academic achievement. In our focus area of education, United Way of Kenosha County is working to address kindergarten literacy readiness by introducing Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to our community. Imagination Library promotes changes in home literacy environments and children’s attitudes toward reading and early literacy skills. These program outcomes will not only help children to be literacy ready by the time they reach kindergarten but will also give them a love for reading that will last a lifetime.

As students approach summer vacation, they have a confession to make: While 77 percent agree that summer reading will help them, 20 percent report not reading any books at all over the summer. The finding is part of Scholastic’s biennial nationally representative survey of children ages 17 and under and their parents. Among the 2,758 students surveyed, the percentage who reported not reading over the summer has increased sharply since Scholastic’s last survey in 2016. Thirty-two percent of kids ages 15-17 said they read no books over the summer, compared to 22 percent in 2016. The number of 9-to-11-year-olds who do not read doubled, increasing from 7 percent to 14 percent. The average number of books read also decreases as students get older. Students in the 6-to-8 age group read an average of 19 books over the summer. Among 15-17-year-olds, however, students said they read only read two on average. The report also found that while 95 percent of parents agreed that reading over the summer can help their child during the school year, 47 percent—nearly half—were unaware of the “summer slide,” the term that refers to students losing learning over the summer.

A group of about 40 sixth graders at Stony Brook School here has been trying to figure out when and where the next earthquake will hit outside of North America. The students researched continental plates and convection currents; they practiced graphing earthquake magnitudes; they looked at case studies in China, Japan and Nepal and considered how people adapt to an earthquake-prone environment; and, ultimately, they had to make their case, in writing, for why they expect the next earthquake to hit when and where they say it will, backing up their hypothesis with a well-reasoned argument and evidence. This single assignment asks students to master science, math, history and language arts standards, which is par for the course for these sixth graders. Their school schedules don’t make distinctions among the four core subjects, which are co-taught by two teachers in an interdisciplinary, project-based environment.

“When you look toward the stars, do you wonder if anyone is looking back? Is Earth the only planet with intelligent life? Is it the only planet with life at all?” These are questions that have beguiled humans young and old for thousands of years, and ones that will continue to captivate us far into the future. Curtis Manley’s new nonfiction picture book, Just Right: Searching for the Goldilocks Planet, tackles these complex wonderings with aplomb through the existence of exoplanets—that is, extrasolar planets that orbit the countless stars across the universe. Manley introduces the concept of a Goldilocks planet, referencing the popular traditional tale about a girl who needed objects to be “just right” for her to use them, to explain that exoplanets could only be inhabitable if conditions and resources were just right for life to exist. Teaching ideas are included in this review.

Seven-year-old Emma McGee used to hate coming to the laundromat. It was boring, and seemed to take forever. In fact she would always ask—unsuccessfully—to stay home with her older brother, Aiden. But things have gotten more interesting since a play space appeared in the back corner of Lavanderia Express IV, a large laundromat nestled next to a family dollar store in the Bronx where Emma and her mother, Venus, come every week. “My favorite thing to do is coloring,” explains Emma, “but my second favorite is reading.” At Lavanderia Express IV, Emma gets to do both. The laundromat is one of three New York City pilot sites of a Clinton Foundation-sponsored project to install family-friendly literacy spaces for kids under six into 600 laundromats across the US by 2020.

Third-graders in Memphis finished their first official TNReady achievement tests last week. Educators across the community and the state are eager to see the results, especially the reading scores. And with good reason: Tennessee has pledged 75% of its third-graders will be proficient readers by 2025. That can’t possibly happen unless reading scores improve dramatically in Shelby County, the state’s largest school district. County school district officials have been even more aggressive with their goals, promising 90% of third-graders in Shelby County Schools will be proficient readers by 2025. Both are ambitious, even audacious goals when you consider a pair of telling statistics: three of four Memphis third-graders, and two in three across Tennessee, don’t read at grade level. That’s despite the unparalleled attention of educators and massive investments of tax dollars during decades of education reforms, much of it devoted to closing the reading gap.

Books for middle-grade readers can suffer the same affliction as all too many older-kid and grown-up books: bombastic, bloated, adverb-crammed. Sometimes an economical, minimalist book — like these three — is exactly what a youthful reader needs in this amped-up world.

Teacher led read alouds are a powerful instructional activity. Decades of research indicate that the read-aloud experience at all grade levels benefits students’ development as readers and their success in school. That’s great news, but what is a post about good, old fashioned read-alouds doing in a blog post about teaching with technology? As a professor in a school library media educator preparation program, I have had the opportunity to observe dozens of school library candidates during their student teaching. Many are expanding and enriching the read-aloud experience using digital resources and technologies. Following are examples of how these candidates supercharge their read-alouds with technology. One idea: bring the book’s author and illustrator to life by integrating engaging, age-appropriate digital resources such as videos, interviews, blogs, and websites about them into the read aloud experience.

A category of students known as “twice exceptional” — believed to make up at least 6 percent of students nationwide — have high academic aptitude but struggle with ADHD, mild autism, dyslexia or other learning and behavioral challenges. They are notoriously difficult for schools to serve effectively for two reasons, say advocates, parents and some educators. Often, their intelligence masks their disability, so they are never assessed for special education or don’t receive the services best suited for them. In other cases, they’re placed in special education classes tailored to their disability but grade levels behind the school work they’re capable of. But a handful of school systems across the country are searching for better ways to accommodate bright students with disabilities. Colorado trains teachers across the state in twice exceptionality, for example, while Montgomery County, Maryland, is perhaps the only school district to offer self-contained classes for students in elementary school who need both an accelerated curriculum and more support than they would receive in a mainstream classroom. Now parent activists in New York City are fighting to get the country’s largest school system to be more responsive to 2e students.

In five years, all Georgia elementary schools will have to screen every kindergartner for a reading condition called dyslexia. But the main effect of Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to sign Senate Bill 48 Thursday should come sooner: new teacher training. The new law calls on the state’s teacher credentialing agency, the Professional Standards Commission, to set new standards for what future teachers must learn about dyslexia. Jennifer Lindstrom serves on the state task force that will recommend the new standards. The goal, said Lindstrom, who teaches at the University of Georgia’s education college, is two-fold: give all future teachers a grounding in dyslexia so they can recognize it and understand it, and create a cadre of teachers with more in-depth knowledge who can serve as specialists.