Today’s Literacy Headlines

Are you looking for a free program that will allow your students to make personal connections with other kids their age around the world? The Global Read Aloud (GRA) project could be the perfect fit. Each spring, a new list of books is released on the GRA website covering a variety of interest levels from kindergarten through high school. During a six-week period in the fall (usually October–November), teachers can select one or more books to read to their class, connect with another classroom, and plan activities with their partner teacher. Here are fun, easy ways to connect with another classroom across the world, including a virtual school tour or postcard exchange. 

On a vacation two years ago, I started to read aloud the first book in the series, “Little House in the Big Woods,” to my own child — and then the next, and the next. Where once I had viewed Ma as a joyless nag, now I saw not just the Sisyphean rounds of her workload but her relentless desire to inject beauty and normalcy into the family’s chaotic, peripatetic lives. The character was no more “fun” and no less prejudiced — I still didn’t see her as especially relatable. But that was no longer all I needed. I sympathized with her during those endless moves, the poverty and hunger and precariousness — living in the wagon for months at a time. She had been there all along, softened by nostalgia and smart editing.

Two bills that would boost federal involvement in reading instruction passed out of a Senate committee on Thursday, signaling Congress’ continued interest in the “science of reading” movement. One, the bipartisan READ Act, would put new requirements on existing federal literacy grants to support early screening for reading difficulties and evidence-based reading instruction, and shift some funding to states with the lowest reading scores. Another, the 21st Century Dyslexia Act, would change how the reading disability dyslexia is classified under federal disability law, establishing dyslexia as its own category.

Watching a colleague implement an instructional practice with students is a highly effective way for the observers to learn it. Here are three benefits of the lab classroom approach: (1) Lab classroom requires less dedicated PD time and can be implemented within the school day. (2) It follows the coaching cycle process utilized in preservice and teacher development programs.
(3) As funds for PD become harder and harder to come by, it is a low-cost “grow your own” alternative.

Outdoor education has been shown to improve academic outcomes across subjects, including science, reading, and math, while also strengthening motivation, well-being, and school engagement. Studies also link outdoor learning to increased attendance, improved behavior, and stronger relationships among students. Equally important are the developmental benefits. Outdoor learning environments support confidence, independence, problem-solving, and leadership—skills that are difficult to cultivate through traditional classroom instruction alone. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced in-person classroom instruction to go virtual, students suddenly needed to have their own laptops or tablets in order to interact with teachers and complete assignments. Today, however, more and more schools are reconsidering how technology fits into teaching and learning, with many districts establishing clearer expectations about when technology should be used, for what purpose and at what ages. Instead of treating screens as the default tool for instruction, some schools are directing teachers to use laptops only when the technology adds clear instructional value.

A multi-university study led by Texas A&M University sheds new light on what matters most in developing literacy. Researchers analyzed nearly 50,000 correlations across 137 coordinated cognitive and achievement tests and found that visual processing played a minimal role in reading ability. General intelligence also played less of a role than previous research suggested. Auditory processing, vocabulary and general knowledge were the most critical factors, the researchers found. Reasoning, memory and mental processing speed played secondary roles.

Picture book biographies, STEM finds, and a deep look at American history make up this list of superlative elementary nonfiction. 

Across the U.S., nearly every state uses a child’s fifth birthday to determine when they can enter the public school system as kindergartners. The shift to full-day kindergarten was not immediate, and program design often looked more like daycare than formal schooling. Gen X and elder millennial parents have vague memories of playing kickball and scribbling with crayons from that first year of formal schooling; today’s kindergartners take standardized tests. So what happens if your child isn’t ready for today’s design?

While the “science of writing” isn’t as deeply researched as the science of how children learn to read, experts generally agree on practices that are key to teaching students how to write. For example, students should be given time each day to write and taught different genres and purposes of writing. Educators should also explicitly instruct students in individual components of writing, starting with handwriting, spelling and vocabulary. Students need to learn that a complete sentence includes a subject and a verb, not just a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end. Later, they must be taught how to connect ideas by expanding and combining sentences. Finally, they can tackle essays, using worksheets and charts to plan their writing. 

[As] I learned more about the science of reading and how it applied to small group time, I realized that my students didn’t need more activities—they needed more opportunities to practice the same decoding skills in a focused, connected way. I decided to simplify everything. No more juggling multiple rotations and activities. I moved to a consistent 15-minute routine built on one target skill. II’ve saved a tremendous amount of planning time. Instead of creating and organizing different activities for every group, I now use the same simple structure and only adjust the skill that I’m teaching.

So universal a condition is boredom — or, as the French call it, ennui — among children that a robust subgenre of books about it already exists. The new picture books “Bored” and “Endless Afternoons” are odes to the joy of having nothing to do. Both admirably resist the common adult suggestion of dealing with boredom by doing things differently in favor of the more challenging process of seeing things differently.

Students with dyslexia and other language-based learning difficulties can benefit greatly from activities that integrate oral language. As a dyslexia therapist working with students in kindergarten through second grade, I know that many of my students have strong ideas but struggle to generate complete, grammatically correct sentences independently. Young students, particularly those with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences, lack opportunities to organize those ideas into language. This realization transformed the way I approached grammar instruction in my classroom. 

The Read Act, introduced by a bipartisan coalition led by Sens. Bill Cassidy and Maggie Hassan, is a great start to addressing the nation’s literacy crisis. The legislation is a chance to finally stop pretending this problem will fix itself. If passed, it will help states use proven strategies to teach kids how to read, identify and support struggling students early, and give teachers and families the tools they need to step in before it’s too late. In practice, the Read Act would mean that more children are screened early for literacy challenges, so problems are caught before they turn into years of frustration. 

A second grade classroom is in a braiding craze. They will braid anything: shoelaces, hair, friendship bracelets, the tails on their toy ponies. But Noah doesn’t have anything to braid. So his teacher takes a whiteboard rag and tears it into three long strips. Soon, Noah is braiding on the school bus. And in the bath. He wakes up early to braid some more. The other kids in Class 203 start bringing in old skirts, tablecloths and curtains to braid. The braid stretches all the way down the hallway and back. What to do with it? “I’m just going to spoil it right here. It ends up as a classroom rug,” says Story Rug author Sophie Blackall. 

The Minnesota Kindergarten Fall Assessment, or MnKFA, relies on educators observing students as they go about their normal daily routines—rather than one-on-one evaluations in front of a computer or with pencil and paper. The MnKFA, which state officials stress isn’t an accountability measure or a traditional kindergarten readiness test, will aim to gather information not just on academic readiness skills like phonemic awareness and numeracy, but also on students’ social-emotional development and approach to learning, such as their ability to solve problems.

68 percent of respondents to SLJ’s Mobile Device Policy Survey noted at least one of four positive impacts on reading or library use: more visible engagement with books and reading materials in classrooms; increased library circulation; more independent reading during free time; and more library traffic. The SLJ poll collected 878 completed responses from U.S. school librarians and educators in late April. Cell phone bans are increasingly becoming the norm across the country.

Reading comprehension is often described as a skill, but as Professor James Kim says, students never just “read.” They always read something. What children understand depends not only on whether they can read the words on the page, but also on what they know about the topic, the vocabulary they can access, and how well they can connect ideas across sentences, texts, and experiences. Kim’s discussion with Assistant Professor Phil Capin highlighted the importance of background knowledge, vocabulary, language comprehension, motivation, and aligned systems of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

One of the biggest challenges in elementary literacy instruction is meeting students at their level. Reading abilities often vary widely within the same classroom, making it essential to create opportunities for targeted support. At Ojibwa Elementary School in Macomb, Michigan, second-grade teacher Renee Sheridan builds dedicated time into each day to meet those different needs through a routine she calls WIN Time—an acronym for “What I Need” Time. WIN Time is a total of 30 minutes per day, and it’s a blend of small group instruction and independent work where students are focused on “just right” tasks that are tailored to skills they need to develop or improve.

Michigan elementary school teachers will be required to take literacy training by the 2031-2032 school year, under a new law signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.  Districts were already required to teach in “evidence-based” ways and screen students for traits of dyslexia beginning with the 2027-28 school year, under laws passed in 2024. Districts must also affirm that teachers have received information about evidence-based literacy practices and related topics. But the law signed Tuesday takes the requirements a step further by prescribing what type of training is required of K-5 teachers. 

Secondary education is not just a “last chance.” It is a powerful chance—requiring urgency, alignment, and distributed responsibility across every classroom and every content area. One of the most important mindset shifts secondary schools can make is challenging the idea that literacy instruction belongs exclusively to ELA teachers or reading specialists. The skills adolescent students need to succeed across all subject areas—decoding and deciphering multisyllabic vocabulary, comprehending complex text, analyzing and synthesizing information—are literacy skills. A history teacher helping students decode colonization and a science teacher breaking down electromagnetism are both doing literacy work.

A new collection by Steven Heller of the famous graphic designer Seymour Chwast’s work for children “unearths a cache of lost treasures.” Chwast has created numerous masterpieces, illustrating for other authors as well as himself. Many are ingenious, teasing with visual puns or playing with form. “Tall City, Wide Country” (1983) is exactly what it says: tall and narrow as a skyscraper or wide as a country mile, depending on how you’re holding it. (It reads in both directions, front to back and vice versa.) “Mother Goooooose” (1971) enhances classic nursery rhymes with pages that fold out to alter the illustrations — an Opposite Day version of Al Jaffee’s Mad magazine Fold-Ins. “I like the idea of turning a book into a toy,” Chwast tells Heller.

Moving special education functions out of the U.S. Department of Education would be detrimental to students with disabilities because it would cause disparities in services across the states and reduce accountability measures, said special education professionals and advocates at the recent Special Education Legislative Summit. 

Third grade retention policies could lead to better student scores, even before any children are held back, a new study suggests. The findings, from researchers at American University and Syracuse University, add another wrinkle to an ongoing debate over retention policies tied to reading scores, which require students who aren’t proficient readers by the end of 3rd grade to repeat the year. Eighteen states currently have retention policies on the books, some part of recently passed “science of reading” laws, according to a tracker maintained by the advocacy group ExcelinEd.

The problem with leveling text is that decades of research, more recently popularized by Science of Reading advocates, show that it doesn’t give students much room to grow. What students need to grow is complex texts, but not only that, complex texts with a teacher modeling how a good reader approaches these texts, while also scaffolding access to them through chunking, discussion, vocabulary practices and all the critical components that we know make up good teaching. 

Under the proposed regulations, many teacher preparation programs — including those focused on early childhood education, bilingual education, English language learners, literacy, and students with disabilities — would be required to align their instruction with the state’s science of reading framework. The framework emphasizes evidence-based approaches including phonics, the relationship between sounds and letters, as well as phonological awareness, oral language, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency.

In this final episode of the Literacy Insights series, Assistant Professor Phil Capin was joined by Margaret Goldberg, co-founder of The Right to Read Project and a reading coach in California. Key takeaways: (1) Literacy improvement is not a sequence of one-time initiatives. It is ongoing, layered work. (2) Language comprehension needs explicit attention, just like foundational skills. (3) Writing can strengthen students’ language and reading development. (4) Translating research into practice requires partnership with educators. (5) Implementation takes time, shared responsibility, and realistic goals. (6) Reliable sources matter in a crowded literacy landscape.



 

Screen time debates should center on whether or not individual technologies, programs, and digital learning experiences are supporting student growth and achievement. For example, there is a clear difference between students interacting with an AI bot versus engaging in meaningful learning using an intentionally-designed online program that delivers personalized learning experiences. 

Asking effective questions in a logical sequence can boost students’ curiosity, thought processes and overall learning gains on a given topic, experts say. But teachers should also be ready to break from planned questions and call an audible when needed to guide discussions in the best direction. While educators can develop questions to determine students’ understanding of material, they can also formulate them to scaffold learning by applying context to facts or ideas, or to model a certain mode of analysis.

In the 2025-26 school year, after a coordinated effort that has involved everyone from district staff to classroom teachers, the chronic absenteeism rate among Namaqua Elementary School kindergartners dropped to 14 percent, compared to 18 percent schoolwide, according to data provided by the district. Namaqua’s progress reflects what research shows can help schools turn around: increasing student and family engagement, fostering relationships between students and staff, communicating with parents and caregivers about children’s attendance patterns, and making sure students feel supported and connected at school.

New research suggests that the more languages people speak, the younger their brains appear. Learning more languages, especially when younger, and achieving fluency in a second language also seem to slow brain aging. The study, Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries shows that brains age more slowly in countries where people are typically multilingual.

EdWeek recently visited a summer program at Bell Graham in St. Charles, Illinois to get a window how teachers try to support students with disabilities. The program is available to students who have Individualized Education Programs. It offers support in the form of speech and language services, occupational therapy, and social services. One of the core goals is to try to ensure that students don’t regress from the academic progress they made during the traditional school year.

Our editors sifted through thousands of submissions to highlight the season’s most noteworthy new releases, including playful riffs on established works, exciting team-ups, and anticipated returns from award-winning creators. Happy reading!

The science of reading has affected teachers and students across the country. This series shares the direct experiences of educators with these efforts. One educator says, “The science of reading movement has been both a blessing and a challenge for literacy instruction. While it’s finally given grammar, a forgotten foundational skill, the research backing it deserves, the heavy emphasis on phonics and prescriptive programs has inadvertently squeezed out time for writing and grammar instruction, ultimately undermining the comprehensive literacy profile the movement aims to achieve.”

Dr. Maria Murray founded the Reading League, a Syracuse-based nonprofit working to improve childhood literacy and change how teachers are trained, to understand the science of reading. The nonprofit has since grown into a national movement working to change how teachers are trained, based on how the human brain learns to read. Murray wants to close the gap between brain science research and classroom practice.

For five weeks each summer, Mooresville Graded School District welcomes students who would benefit from additional literacy support. The focus is literacy, but the atmosphere is intentionally different from a typical school day. “While it is an extension of the school year, we want it to be engaging and exciting for students,” Conley shares. Across North Carolina, districts continue strengthening literacy instruction aligned to science of reading research and the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021 (EPSA). Summer reading camps provide additional instructional time while giving students opportunities to continue building literacy skills during the summer months.

As a reading specialist, I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to infuse my love of language into my daily practice. I decided to create a word journal for each student. In the journal, students would examine one word, with sustained curiosity and attention, for the entirety of the school year. My goal was to make the learning process systematic and cumulative, so that each month, students could dig deeper into their word’s meaning and begin to notice how language affects the ways we think about, see, and experience the world. I’m happy to report that’s exactly what happened. Here’s how it went.

Picture a second grader who is struggling to read at a school trying hard to fix that. He gets his regular classroom lessons, is pulled out for intervention during the day and works with a tutor. On paper, he is a child surrounded by support. But here’s what it feels like from his seat. In his classroom, his teacher references a “silent e,” but the intervention software calls it a “magic e.” His tutor uses different hand signals and follows a different skills sequence. Supports meant to reinforce classroom learning are unintentionally cutting against that, leaving him to sort it out alone. When a Tennessee district aligned instruction across classrooms and tutoring, students were more likely to engage in grade-level work.

By now you may have heard that a film based on the Leonard Marcus biography Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon is currently in the works. But why stop here? What if, for whatever reason, this film becomes a massive hit? What then? Could we see a whole host of remarkable films based on the fantastic lives of various children’s book creators?

A new tool can help districts and publishers accelerate literacy in grades 9-12. The Knowledge Matters High School Review Tool identifies curriculum features including activities that systematically develop academic and domain-specific vocabulary; guidance for educators to engage students in productive and sustained academic discussions; explicit instruction in writing and frequent writing opportunities anchored in texts; targeted supports to grant equitable access to grade-level content; and predictable, effective instructional routines and teacher-facing materials to inform professional learning.

Beyond typical classroom uses for fluency and decoding practice, or as mentor texts for writing, quality children’s literature creates the opportunity for readers to experience the world. Rudine Simms Bishop, who used the metaphor of books as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors, described reading as a transformational experience. Accurate and sensitive portrayals of characters in children’s books are important because children learn about themselves and others through the literature to which they are exposed. 

Students in K-2 showed little to no progress for reading readiness, according to end-of-school-year data for 2025-26 compared to the year before in a new report from Amplify, an assessment and curriculum provider. National composite scores found that 66% of K-2 students are on track for learning to read with 34% of young learners scoring below benchmark. Amplify recommends districts use a multi-tiered systems of support that coordinates instruction, intervention, progress monitoring and teacher professional development to help young students build reading skills.

In the span of just two years, artificial intelligence has moved from an emerging curiosity to an operational reality in American K–12 classrooms. And most school districts are scrambling to update or create policies that reflect the ever-changing world of AI. But what does an AI policy landscape look like? A new AI School Policy Database provides a snapshot of a field that is neither panicking nor confidently leading: it is waiting, watching and managing uncertainty one teacher-directed decision at a time.

These five strategies can help special education teams set up a consistent PLC meeting time and use that time effectively, allowing for meaningful discussion and action planning around student progress.

The Lena Grow program, which collects data on preschooler talk and trains teachers to increase conversations, has been linked to higher reading scores. Researchers have found that talk and interaction between adults and children in their first few years of life often impacts future cognitive development and academic achievement. This engagement is measured in “conversational turns,” or the back-and-forth exchange of words between children and adults. 

Reading allows children to live in a vibrant world, surrounded by fairies, elves and talking animals, transporting them to places where the impossible becomes real. But reading for pleasure also helps children learn more effectively and broadens how they view, interpret and interact with the world. It gives them a form of expression that fuels their imagination and empathy for themselves and others.

As Massachusetts implements a new literacy mandate, officials must not lose sight of the ultimate goal: helping more students learn to read.

A practical framework for evaluating whether technology is supporting deep learning, meaningful engagement, and instructional goals.

Fourth grade literacy gains earned Mississippi national acclaim. But that achievement tapers off as students advance to higher grades. Lawmakers are putting millions toward changing that. Senate Bill 2294 directs $9 million toward the Adolescent Literacy Initiative, which will fund literacy coaches in districts across the state starting this school year. The initiative ramps up literacy education for fourth through eighth grade students, including introducing assessments throughout the year to gauge how well students are keeping up with reading benchmarks and requiring schools use high-quality curriculum pre-selected by the agency. Early pilots have been lauded among educators, but it’s too early to see results yet. 

The number of students with disabilities spending some of their school day in general education classrooms steadily increased over the past decade, driven by a rise in students who spend at least 80% of their time learning alongside their peers without disabilities, according to a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. GAO researchers also found certain characteristics of districts that had a higher percentage of students with disabilities who spent at least 40% of their day in general education classrooms.

The International Literacy Association (ILA) proudly announces the recipients of its 2026 Children’s and Young Adult Book Awards. These awards honor newly published authors who demonstrate exceptional talent in literature for children and young adults, with a focus on authentic stories that connect with readers around the globe. This year’s selected titles highlight the power of individuals and communities who challenge obstacles, reclaim their voices, and reshape the world around them. Together, these stories encourage readers to see the world through different perspectives.

Young children need different conditions than older students to thrive. Some school leaders are adapting their practices to reflect that reality. Joel Francik and his principal colleagues participated in the P-3 Leadership Program, which seeks to help elementary school administrators develop and then deepen their knowledge and understanding of the early grades, with a focus on children in pre-K to third grade.

The administration is carrying out the overhaul through 14 interagency agreements that move at least 148 K–12 and higher education programs to six other federal agencies. The old structure has real problems. But replacing one department with scattered agency partnerships isn’t constructive unless it makes the system clearer, more accountable, and more useful to the people it serves. I’ve compiled it with assistance from ChatGPT and Claude, based on publicly available information from Education Week and K–12 Dive. For each of the six partner agencies, it identifies what Education Department work has moved or is moving, why the administration believes the fit makes sense, and the issues that I believe are worth watching as implementation occurs.

By commemorating the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rather than the compromises of the Constitution or the amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, do Americans signal that we prefer the rebellious spirit of 1776 to building consensus, legislating and governing? New works by Christy Mihaly, Carole Boston Weatherford, Howard W. Reeves and Derrick Barnes show that there is still much to celebrate, rebel against and amend.

Reader’s theater is a theater-inspired activity in which students orally recite and bring text to life through performance. While bringing reader’s theater into the classroom requires some thoughtful planning, a concrete structure can help you navigate this instructional practice and make sure that students are getting the most they can out of it. In my own classroom, I’ve found the following routine to be the most effective way to get started with reader’s theater.

Just 1 in 10 kindergartners who start school at the bottom of their class in reading and math skills is proficient by third grade. This finding comes from a new analysis of MAP reading and math scores from the testing organization NWEA. It aligns with a large body of research that finds that many educational gaps are already present in kindergarten and remain stubbornly persistent throughout children’s educational careers. “The key story for me in these findings is that early intervention matters, and if we just wait until third grade to get a signal of where kids are, we’re missing probably the most important window when we can do something about it,” said Megan Kuhfeld, NWEA director of growth modeling and data analytics

School’s out for summer, but this break can be a pivotal time for children to continue learning. Researchers have identified a phenomenon called summer slide, the loss of students’ academic skills when school is not in session, which is largely due to a lack of reading. A recent study of third to fifth graders showed that on average students lost about 20% of their school-year gains in reading. Reading especially benefits young children, and having adults in their lives who prioritize reading is crucial to developing frequent readers. To prevent this summer slide, Barbara Wasik, professor and PNC Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Education in Temple’s College of Education and Human Development, suggests seven ways that parents and guardians can support and encourage kids’ literacy over the summer.  

Over the past decade, instruction has focused on teaching reading skills with short excerpts. The idea seemed promising. Demonstrate strategies that approximate what proficient readers do on a small piece of text like the ones students meet on an assessment and assume they will emerge competent readers. As stagnant National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores demonstrate, the approach hasn’t worked. Why not? Too much practice with strategies and not enough reading. A recent RAND Corp. survey reports that roughly 60% of middle and high school teachers assign three books or fewer in a school year. Three books a year does not a reader make, particularly if those books are classic texts like Julius Caesar or The Scarlet Letter that intimidate many young readers. It’s time to bring back books, but we also need to rethink what it means to teach a work of literature. No more spending eight weeks of class on a single novel; no more reading the whole book aloud to 10th graders. We need fewer quizzes and maybe even less annotating. Here’s what teachers and school leaders can do instead.

Educators could predict — as early as kindergarten — whether students will achieve reading and math proficiency by 3rd grade, according to a new study by research and assessment company NWEA. Researchers found that reading and math skills upon entering kindergarten strongly foreshadow whether students will reach proficiency three years later. Only 1 in 10 of the lowest performing kindergarteners reached proficiency by 3rd grade, and by the end of 1st grade, those odds dropped to 1 in 50.  Students’ 3rd grade academic performance is considered an indicator for long-term academic and life outcomes.

I currently teach 23 second grade students who are eager to use technology in ways that far exceed what many adults expect from young learners. My students represent a wide range of academic ability, socioeconomic backgrounds, and linguistic identities, which means each of their products rarely look the same. Teaching in such a diverse classroom has taught me how difficult it can be to get every student invested in literacy projects. Yet it has also shown me how transformative digital tools can be when students are positioned as creators rather than passive consumers.