Today’s Literacy Headlines

The new question-of-the-week is: What is the single most effective instructional strategy you have used to teach writing? Teaching and learning good writing can be a challenge to educators and students alike. Today, Jenny Vo, Michele Morgan, and Joy Hamm share wisdom gained from their teaching experience. Before I turn over the column to them, though, I’d like to share my favorite tool(s). Graphic organizers, including writing frames (which are basically more expansive sentence starters) and writing structures (which function more as guides and less as “fill-in-the-blanks”) are critical elements of my writing instruction. You can see an example of how I incorporate them in my seven-week story-writing unit and in the adaptations I made in it for concurrent teaching. You might also be interested in The Best Scaffolded Writing Frames For Students.

Young children have been among those hardest hit by academic disruptions during the pandemic, and experts worry that already overwhelmed early-childhood-education teachers will grapple with a rocky transition as those students enter or return to school this fall. That’s the consensus of a new research analysis by 11 university and independent research groups tracking education for children ages 0-8 (roughly preschool through grade 2) during the pandemic. The report collected data from 16 national studies, 45 state studies, and 15 local studies.

For science teachers around the country who live and work in the regions where the periodical cicadas have come out this year, the timing is perfect: After a year of virtual lessons, flagging student engagement and ongoing stress, a real-life science lesson has crawled out of the ground — and started singing. For Nancy Murtaugh, a fourth-grade math and science teacher at Fairfield North Elementary in Ohio, the cicada unit was a “golden moment” at the end of a long school year. “Everything just came together and I felt like, this is our class, we’re back,” she said. “They were engaged in learning, they were 100 percent in. And that’s when you make the brain connections,” Murtaugh said. “If you’re not actively involved in something, and you don’t care about it, you’re not going to make those brain connections, it’s not going to stay in your long-term memory. They’re going to remember this stuff forever.”

John Newbery is called the “Father of Children’s Literature,” not because he was the first to publish children’s books — he wasn’t — but because he was the first to turn them into a profitable business. In mid-18th-century England, a new and growing middle class had money to spend on their children, and Newbery gave them something to spend it on. Beginning in 1744, he published about 100 storybooks for children, plus magazines and “ABC” books, becoming the leading children’s publisher of his time. More than 175 years later, when editor Frederic Melcher suggested that the American Library Association create an annual award “for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,” he asked that it be named for Newbery, an Englishman who never set foot in America.

Search engines like Google are powerful and often essential resources, and students of all ages can build skills that help them navigate these spaces. Teachers can model good search behavior by thinking aloud after conducting a search. They can walk students through their thought processes for picking and choosing between a list of websites in a set of search results. Students can see how teachers make snap judgments to rule out certain search results and how they dig deeper into other search results to evaluate their authority.

Thursday, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law making Juneteenth the first federal holiday established since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Marking the date when General Gordon Granger arrived with the Union Army to enforce that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were free – June 19, 1865 – Juneteenth is a celebration of Black liberation that has been held in some communities for generations. Around the nation, people will honor Juneteenth this weekend with talks, dance performances, movies, parades, barbecue and strawberry pop and more. Want to help kids understand what it’s about? We are thrilled to have this powerful post by our friend, Torrey Maldonado, who shares why the holiday matters to him and features quotes by a wonderful collection of outstanding Black creators. Happy Juneteenth!

Books can provide a mirror for kids to understand themselves and a window into the world around them. Yet for many generations, Black characters were almost nonexistent in children’s books. Very often, the few that did appear were limited, with one kind of hair and one skin tone. “Thinking about the books that were popular during my childhood, not many of them featured characters that looked like me. My parents had to search hard to find them,” says Keneisha Sinclair-McBride, psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Happily, children’s literature has changed in recent years. These days, families can choose from an ever-growing selection of children’s books by and about people of a variety of races. Here, Sinclair-McBride discusses why diversity in children’s books is great for kids and recommends some of her favorite children’s books about Black families.

School districts across the country are turning to summer programs to combat the educational impact of the pandemic. SLJ’s May survey of 427 school librarians showed 61 percent of the respondents’ districts were planning summer programs specifically designed to overcome student learning loss during this time. Under the federal pandemic relief package, states are required to use some of the money for summer programs. The state of Tennessee made it mandatory for all schools to offer six weeks of programming. In Philadelphia, summer programs have been expanded to district-wide eligibility and, by partnering with community organizations, offer in-person options for every grade level. More than 14,500 students had enrolled so far, according to one report, which said there were 9,300 students in last summer’s all-virtual summer sessions. New York City, which has the country’s largest public school system, and San Diego are also offering summer school for all students not just those struggling academically.

Sarah Kamya saw a lot of Little Free Libraries in her neighborhood: She found five of the cute wooden boxes that look like oversize birdhouses but are filled with books within two miles of her parents’ house. Little Free Libraries are maintained by a host and serve as trading posts where neighbors can leave books to share or take home books they want. But when Kamya took a look at the books inside the boxes, she found them to be homogeneous uninspiring—and white.Thus was born Little Free Diverse Libraries, a project Kamya never expected to start that has now been featured on LIVE with Kelly and Ryan and other media and has raised about $20,000. Kamya has used that money to send diverse books purchased from Black-owned bookstores to Little Free Libraries around the country. Her latest initiative is donating fully stocked Little Free Diverse Libraries to schools with diverse populations in Massachusetts and New York

More and more American students are falling significantly behind in reading, and the widespread academic disruptions during the pandemic are likely to create a critical mass of struggling readers in the nation’s schools, new analyses of federal data show. There’s been no improvement in overall reading performance at any grade level in the national tests called the Nation’s Report Card for the past decade or more, with declines for lower grades happening since 2017 and for 12th graders since 2015. That stagnation has been driven largely by a growing share of students failing to meet even the most basic level of reading proficiency, and by steadily falling scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress for the 10 percent to 25 percent of students who struggle the most with reading.

After a year filled with disruptions, many parents are worried about how to prevent the “summer slide”—a significant decrease in reading and math skills over summer break, a phenomenon that hits poor kids particularly hard. The summer slide is a real problem, and we don’t want to diminish it, but particularly after the year that we’ve all just been through, kids deserve a chance to have fun, run around outside with friends, and relax. Now is the time, as much as is feasible, to let kids feel as little anxiety as possible. Fun should be the priority, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid academic reinforcement entirely. Carve out some time for literacy and math, making both a regular part of your daily routine.

Depending on where you live, “school” is almost “out.” Whether you’re trying to figure out how to entertain your kids in the wake of a stressful and disjointed year or attempting to infuse your own life with a renewed sense of childlike wonder, we have some reading suggestions that might be able to help. Journey from America’s national parks to the insides of the human body to, yes, the world of Minecraft. Solve alien mysteries and fall in love. Our favorite new young adult and kids’ releases promise to breathe life into these slow, sticky dog days.

For the first time since the pandemic began, the majority of 4th graders nationwide have finally made it back to classes in person full time, according to the latest federal data. But there are still big racial and socioeconomic differences in who has access to full-time in-person instruction. In the fourth of five monthly federal surveys this spring, tracking how schools have been reopening and instructing students during the pandemic, the National Center for Education Statistics finds that by April, nearly all K-8 schools offered at least some in-person instruction, and 56 percent of them provided full-time instruction on campus.

Colorado soon will require prospective elementary, early childhood, and special education teachers to take a more in-depth exam on reading instruction to earn their state teaching licenses. The State Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the new exam, called the Praxis 5205. The requirement will take effect Sept. 1 for all teacher candidates who are taking licensure tests for the first time on or after that date. The shift to a test that demands prospective teachers have more knowledge about reading instruction aligns with the state’s ongoing push to boost reading proficiency rates among Colorado students.

Reading is arguably the most foundational skill you learn in school, and more than half of Colorado fourth graders are not reading on grade level. It is more urgent than ever for teachers, administrators, and university faculty to “know better” by becoming students of the science of reading. This is why I am energized that the State Board of Education on Wednesday is scheduled to consider a recommendation to help ensure future educators are prepared to teach reading using scientifically based approaches, through an additional licensure test that more specifically assesses a candidate’s knowledge of the five key areas of reading development.

In “community KWL,” students ask their families what they know, wonder, and have learned about a topic to spark more questions to investigate.

As physicians who study infectious disease and epidemiology, we believe that the best way to prevent Covid-19 from spreading in schools is to vaccinate the adults — teachers, staff and parents — throughout the school. When more people in a community are protected against the coronavirus, unprotected people, such as the children who aren’t yet able to get vaccinated, are less likely to be exposed. Children ages 12 and older should be encouraged to get immunized, and vaccines are likely to be available for younger children this fall. The coronavirus will likely still be circulating at low levels this fall, so schools cannot simply operate as they did before the pandemic. school districts should focus on the tactics that work against transmitting the virus. This op-ed suggests an approach to sanitizing routines, COVID-19 testing, quarantining, masks, and social distancing.

Despite the difficulties of offering support remotely, resource specialist Vikram Nahal found that virtual learning allowed him to experiment with new technologies that supported his students with learning disabilities. Speech-to-text technology allowed them to more easily transfer their ideas onto the page. This especially helped his students with ADHD and processing-related disabilities, such as auditory processing disorder or working memory deficits. Speech-to-text tools also saved time, which is helpful for students who might forget their ideas once they try to write or students who struggle with getting any words on the page at all, feeling unable to transfer their thoughts. For some, this was because of the intimidation of writing academically, with spelling and grammar anxieties prohibiting them from starting. For others, the time taken to write out initial thoughts caused them to forget later conclusions and analyses, given the lack of immediacy in writing.

A new review of one of the top 10 most popular reading programs claims that the curriculum has gaps in its alignment to reading research, and doesn’t offer enough supports for teachers. The analysis comes from Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit educational consulting group that started tapping teams of researchers to evaluate popular reading programs last year. The curriculum in question is Wonders, a basal reading program published by McGraw Hill. According to a recent Education Week Research Center survey: 15 percent of early reading teachers surveyed used Wonders in their classrooms. Reviewers found many positives: foundational skills components, lots of English-language learner support, complex texts, and some evidence of knowledge building. But the reviewers also said the program was “overwhelming” and bulky, “a significant issue that dilutes its many strengths.” There’s more content than teachers could reasonably get through, they wrote, allowing for teacher choice in designing units—but the reviewers cautioned that this design puts a lot of onus on teachers.

Though most in-person events have been canceled or put on hold over the past year, nothing could stop the Eisner nominations (selected for creative achievement in American comic books). This year, veteran artist Gene Luen Yang is honored (twice, actually), but newcomers are spotlighted, too, like debut graphic novelists Kiku Hughes for Displacement, a dynamic blend of fact and fiction centering on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and Kat Leyh for Snapdragon, a tale of a snarky teenager coming into her own magical powers. See below for a full list of the Eisner nominations of books for children and teens, with links to our reviews and coverage—11 of the 18 nominated books received SLJ stars, and seven were named Best Books.

I wanted to explore what goes into being a high-performing and improving district that serves children of color and children from low-income backgrounds. In my new book, I profile five such districts. There’s tiny Lane and Cottonwood in southeastern Oklahoma; Valley Stream 30 in suburban New York; rural Seaford in lower Delaware; small, urban Steubenville, Ohio; and gargantuan Chicago, Illinois. Different locales, different demographics, different assessments, different funding, different governance structures — in other words, they all had very different contexts. And yet, at the heart of these districts are educators who believe in the capacity of all kids to learn, grow, and achieve — and in the responsibility of adults to help them do so.

As schools let out for summer, there are undoubtedly aspects of the past year that teachers and parents alike are ready to leave behind. But then there are the benefits that some are hoping stick around. Among them: better communication strategies and tools that make it easier for special education parents and teachers to interact. Those are lessons that should stay in place long after our current era of remote learning, says research analyst Lane McKittrick, who focuses on special education and families at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. She recently co-authored a report on how charter schools effectively supported students with disabilities during the pandemic.

At least 29 states and Washington, D.C., allow or require schools to hold back struggling 3rd graders who don’t pass state standardized reading tests, the result of ongoing attempts to close the nation’s achievement gap. But as families wrestle with online learning, a pandemic economy, and mental health difficulties, some states are revisiting that approach. Two states, Florida and Mississippi, decided this year that pupils who fail reading assessments won’t be held back. Lawmakers in a third state, Michigan, are debating the same policy. Proponents of letting students pass despite failed assessments say states should focus resources on strengthening classroom instruction and literacy intervention efforts. Critics counter that students who aren’t retained will continue to struggle academically.

As San Antonio school officials turn their attention toward the 2021-22 academic year and recovery efforts to catch kids up, they hope to convince still-hesitant teachers to believe in the practicality and facility of the science of reading method. To make their case, science of reading proponents point to its effectiveness and success during the pandemic: At a time when children could not learn to read by being exposed to a word-rich environment in classrooms with overflowing libraries and word walls, the science of reading still worked, converting more easily to Zoom. While neither the state nor local school districts seem ready to mandate exclusive use of the science of reading, researchers, politicians and school officials have been moving Texas in that direction for years, arguing that balanced literacy is inadequate to make the gains the state needs to see.

A fleet of mobile immersive labs gives students in rural and low-income communities hands-on STEM experiences. When science teacher Kathryn Spivey told her students at Benjamin Banneker Middle School in Burtonsville, Maryland that they were going to take off and visit planet Mars for a day on a Magic School Bus of their own, they didn’t know what to expect. Inside, a long bench runs along one end of the bus’ gleaming white interior, with tablets stationed in the middle. The bus is also decked out with high-definition video and special effects panels, which take students on a five-minute, 360-degree immersive trip across the entire solar system. Students learn about each of the planets before they land on planet Mars, how to solve problems that astronauts could face on a journey into space, and get to work on designing a rover and completing activities that help them think like engineers.