Today’s Literacy Headlines

Jacqueline Woodson’s new novel, “Before the Ever After,” is not a work of horror (despite the haunting title), but a creeping, invisible force is upending ZJ’s world and slowly stealing away his father — known as “Zachariah 44,” for his jersey number — before his and his mother’s eyes. The father’s hands have begun to tremble uncontrollably. He stares vacantly. He forgets basic things, most achingly the name of the son who bears, and at times is burdened by, his name. He’s prone to angry outbursts, to the point that ZJ’s friends no longer want to come by the house. He is suffering the effects of a degenerative brain disease that, while not named, bears a strong resemblance to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which has been found in scores of former N.F.L. players.

For as long as Connie LuVenia Williams can remember, letters have been giving her trouble. Sure, she learned the ABCs, but making sense of how these symbols we call letters combine to form the sounds that make up the English language – that part stumped her. And from what she remembers nobody taught her those skills as a kid. Activists in Oakland, California, where Williams lives, have been pushing schools to focus on how students are being taught to read as a way to improve literacy. Members of the NAACP and an advocacy organization called Oakland REACH, started by Oakland parents whose kids attend the district’s lowest performing schools, have coalesced around a campaign for better reading instruction they’re calling Literacy for All. Williams is one of its most outspoken members.

This can’t be emphasized enough: Strong relationships will be essential to students’ academic success and well-being this coming school year. And now, the beginning of the semester, is a crucial time for developing the personal connections that students will need to sustain them through what is going to be an unpredictable school year, at best. But with schools either operating remotely, alternating online instruction with in-person classes, or closing due to an outbreak, developing meaningful relationships between teachers and students—and even among staff, students, and families—will be a challenge. How can educators, then, build these all-important connections with students, especially over physical distances? Following are four tips for how to make that work.

Micki Boas has been fighting for years for both of her sons, now ages 8 and 11, who have dyslexia, a type of learning disability that can lead to difficulty in reading comprehension and can impact the person’s interest in reading. For her 11-year-old, Boas said it took four years, four lawyers and four schools to finally get him a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and the support that’s mandated by law. To help other parents navigate the confusing waters of a dyslexia diagnosis, Boas quit her job and wrote, “One in Five: Fighting for Our Dyslexic Kids,” published in August. The book features the stories of 20 parents of children with dyslexia, the struggles they’ve faced, and shortcuts that parents can use to help their children now. Part of the problem, Boas said, is that children are being diagnosed with dyslexia too late. Oftentimes, they’re diagnosed around age 10, but the average child should be reading by age 7.

The U.S. Department of Education will allow flexibility within the 21st Century Community Learning Center program so that schools can use the funds during the regular school day. The waiver will accommodate districts’ efforts to provide learning hubs and centers for students during distance learning. The notice, published in the Federal Register Thursday, states that the department “requested an emergency clearance because schools are already opening or will be opening very soon, and the flexibility offered through a waiver will enable [state education agencies] and subgrantees to better meet the needs of students through more nimble” programs. While a 60-day comment period is still in place, states and districts can already apply for the waiver.

As many Michigan children return to online classes this fall, educators warn that online instruction — already challenging for most students — will be especially damaging for students who don’t speak English. In theory, this would be terrible news for the Hamtramck school district: 64% of the district’s students are classified as English learners, while another 14% are former English learners who have learned enough to leave the program. Instead, Hamtramck Public School’s pre-pandemic support systems for immigrant families have ensured that students don’t fall through the cracks. A team of bilingual parent liaisons, hired two years ago to support newcomers from other countries, worked through the summer to ensure that families had access to food, laptops, and an internet connection. An in-person orientation held weeks before the first day of online classes helped hundreds of U.S. newcomers navigate the challenges of remote instruction.

Across the country, whether your kids are learning remotely, doing some hybrid of online and in-person, or back fully in-person, with new protocols like masks, social distancing and staying in only one classroom, school will most likely not look anything like it did in February. I know how lucky I am that my kids used to enjoy school in the first place, but I really started to wonder: How do I keep their love of school alive in these unusual and unstable circumstances? So I asked a kindergarten teacher, a child psychologist and a learning specialist for their suggestions.

It is a misconception that learning sign language hinders spoken language development for implanted children. Research shows the opposite to be true. Deaf children of deaf parents, whose first language is sign language, end up having better spoken language skills once they are implanted than deaf children of hearing parents who did not learn sign language. Research also shows a relationship between sign language and spoken English in school-aged children with cochlear implants: The children who scored highly in sign language were the same ones who scored highly in English. And the children with weak sign language skills also struggled with spoken English. In fact, sign language is so good for the developing brain some hearing parents teach it to their hearing children to boost brain development and jump-start communication before speech.

School librarians are creating plans to greet their returning students, ease their anxieties, and address whatever learning gaps widened during the spring and summer. “Especially in this time of uncertainty, librarians have never been more critical to the nation’s schools,” says a new report from EveryLibrary Institute, “School Librarians and the COVID Slide.” “They are essential in helping teachers and students understand how to find and utilize high-quality digital tools and content.” More than 80 percent of respondents to that study said they provided curated resources for at-home activities, nearly as many shared community resources, and six out of 10 offered technical support. Almost half of librarians reported co-teaching a class, while slightly more than one in 10 offered students makerspace events and gaming.

Remote learning isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s especially challenging for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other learning disabilities. NPR’s Jon Hamilton reports on the challenges facing these students and their parents, who are often required to become educators to make it work. Not all parents have the privilege of being able to help their children with remote learning though. Many students also face the challenge of logging on for school without reliable Internet. NPR’s Anya Kamenetz and WWNO’s Aubri Juhasz report on “learning hubs” that offer free child care and additional learning resources — but only for a lucky few.

We asked you to tell us about your favorite kids’ books, from board books for babies to great read-alouds to early chapter books and even a few books for older readers. And thousands of you answered. As with all our summer polls, this one isn’t a straight-up popularity contest. (Otherwise it would have been nothing but 100 Mo Willems books — and we love Mo Willems, but that wouldn’t have been the most useful list.) Rather, it’s a curated list built from your recommendations and picks from our expert panel of judges — a fantastic group of authors, librarians, publishers and all-around book nerds. And instead of a ranked list, it’s grouped into categories that we hope will help you find just the right books for the kids in your life: Picture Perfect, Baby’s Bookshelf, Conversation Starters, Family Life, Animal (and Monster) Friends, Folktales and Fairy Tales, Fun to Read Out Loud, Nonfiction, Early Chapter Books, and Older Readers. Happy reading!

Research suggests a way to restructure remote learning to give students what they’ve been missing. Staff at the Policy Analysis for California Education at Stanford University have been reviewing research that can help guide districts as they think about this fall. We started from the premise, based in research, that whether in person or remotely, effective instruction provides students a mix of expository, active, and interactive learning opportunities. The best evidence for how to sequence expository, active, and interactive learning—and how to make the most use of the limited synchronous time in virtual classrooms—comes from the flipped-classroom model, which has shown small positive effects on student outcomes over 100 studies. Flipped classrooms first present students with new information asynchronously (by textbook or video, for example) and then require students to complete activities that help them process the basic information and practice new skills independently (via comprehension questions or practice problems, among other means).

Generations of Black children in Holmes County bear scars from the state’s underinvestment in their education. Now, the community is trying to regroup as a new school year begins. Covid-19 may be less likely to sicken kids, but there’s little guarantee they will come through the crisis unscathed. In Holmes County, it’s children who are bearing the brunt of the dual pandemics coming to a head as summer ends. Schools are struggling to keep learning going as buildings remain closed, federal help for the poor and hungry is shutting down, and desperate families have been left largely on their own to figure out how to avoid a deadly disease while also feeding, housing and educating their children.

In these strange times in the midst of a pandemic, nothing tells a student that you are invested in them personally more than a phone call. Even in a five-minute conversation, the teacher gets to intently listen to the student as if no one and nothing else matters, easily trumping group Zoom calls and prerecorded video messages. More important, I have been able to gather significant information about a student’s home life and how they’re engaging with my classes, and I’m confident that no survey could have produced this data. I have learned about time, motivation, and attention management issues, as well as network issues that force them to work from the terrace of their houses, overwhelm due to too many pending tasks, misunderstandings in the content, and a myriad of tech issues such as multiple Edmodo accounts and forgotten passwords. This data informed my subsequent lessons and improved my instruction delivery significantly.

Lately, I find myself thinking of my students and considering how I can nurture their independent reading within my virtual classroom. Here are some suggestions of how you can encourage independent reading: host a book show-and-tell, invite guest readers, match reading buddies, establish online book clubs, share your own reading life, Promote audiobooks, and encourage book talks.

When you teach a student who has a stutter, you are likely balancing two challenges: managing special considerations, and often an IEP, for a student who has a complex disorder that is not fully understood, and cultivating a classroom that is understanding and supportive. Tim Mackesey, a speech language pathologist who specializes in the evaluation and treatment of speech disorders (and himself a severe stutterer for over 20 years), shares these strategies, several of which are counterintuitive to people who are not familiar with stuttering.

COVID-19 forced Keriann Wilmot’s son to trade his classroom for a computer. It was a tough transition for a 10-year-old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It was a different environment for him,” Wilmot says. “He wasn’t used to this kind of work from school coming in the format of an email in his Chromebook every single day.” Her son would avoid math and writing and instead go straight to his favorite subjects: science and social studies. But even then, online assignments could be a problem. Wilmot was much better prepared than most parents to help her son. She’d spent 20 years as an occupational therapist who specializes in helping children with ADHD and other learning disabilities. Even so, working with her own child was tough.

In the collection development department at the Fort Worth (TX) Public Library, we devote a lot of time and energy to building collections that are as diverse, equitable, and inclusive as possible. We have many discussions about topics including the Diversity in Children’s Books surveys put out by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), #OwnVoices, and how to create a catalog that will help staff and patrons find diverse materials. Building and maintaining inclusive collections is only one piece of the puzzle for libraries seeking to promote equity and inclusion. What happens if you build an inclusive collection but nobody knows it’s there or how to use it? This question led us to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion training throughout our system.

Melissa Malzkuhn is the founder and creative director of Gallaudet University’s Motion Light Lab. Since 2013 her team has worked with Deaf storytellers and artists to create bilingual stories for their VL2 ASL Storybook Apps. But with schools across the country closed amid the COVID-19 outbreak, Deaf children have less access to such stories. As schools across the country moved to distance learning, Malzkuhn’s team opened free access to their storybook apps. They weren’t alone in their efforts. Educators and advocates across the Deaf community have curated lessons, created storytime videos and organized events to support Deaf students’ literacy. Here are six ASL resources to help Deaf students engage with books and storytelling during distance learning.

Colorado students in kindergarten through third grade soon will have access to lessons in reading, math, science, and art through their television sets. Gov. Jared Polis announced the launch of “Colorado Classroom: Learn with Me at Home” on Monday. The programming airs for at least 15 weeks on Rocky Mountain PBS. Developed in partnership with the Colorado Department of Education and the Colorado Education Initiative, the programming for young students builds on a summer program focused on literacy. The lessons, with a different theme each week, will reach families even if they don’t have internet access. Every Friday will feature interactive science lessons developed with help from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The lessons will be broadcast in English with Spanish subtitles.

As education organizations and initiatives such as Teaching Tolerance, the Zinn Education Project, Black Lives Matter at School, the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Curriculum and others strive to give educators the tools to teach anti-bias and antiracism, educators are grappling with how to implement these resources in early grades. For Katie Cryan Leary, the principal of the newly opened Magnolia Elementary in Seattle Public Schools, creating an antiracist, anti-bias school can be a messy, uncomfortable journey. That’s especially true in a district that, in the 19 years she’s been working there, has committed to racial equity but still struggles to serve the needs of a wide range of students. To her, antiracism education in elementary school starts with students’ awareness of themselves, of others and of how those interactions play out. She believes that social emotional learning — giving kids the tools to manage and express their feelings — is the heart of race and equity work.

When this fifth-grade teacher shifted his school newspaper online, he found that students were motivated to produce high-quality work for an authentic audience—and felt more connected as a community. Get do’s and don’ts for a virtual newspaper and how to get it launched.

Across the U.S., parents are weighing agonizing choices about in-person versus virtual schooling this fall. Many parents are struggling to support their children through remote learning while they themselves have full-time jobs or shift work with unpredictable schedules that can upend family lives. But once the question of how children will learn this year is answered, another equally pressing one arises: Where, exactly, will this learning take place? During this pandemic, Leah Dela Cruz has taken the idea of learning anywhere to heart. Ms. Dela Cruz lives with her husband and their two children, Lauren, 6, and Rocco, 16 months, in a two-bedroom, 750-square foot apartment in San Mateo, Calif. With the living room as her only option for a classroom, Ms. Dela Cruz gave away a big table and a bookshelf and created two tidy spaces, one on the left with a TV tray as a desk for Lauren and one on the right with a play area for Rocco. Lauren uses an old iPad for distance learning, and arts and crafts activities are done with simple materials like Popsicle sticks and colored pencils.

While intergenerational reading has always involved a valuable shared experience on many levels, the pandemic has drawn more people to all-ages book clubs and programs, many organized virtually by nonprofits and libraries. Virtual programming can involve a wider crowd, and the crushing events of 2020 have prompted meaningful explorations of books focusing on equity, racism, and family, historical or contemporary. The Reading into History program at the New York Historical Society (NYHS) is one example: it gives “kids and their parents equal footing to be interested in something,” says Alice Stevenson, vice president and director of the DiMenna Children’s History Museum at NYHS.

Student collaboration is critical. Partner reading builds fluency. Sharing manipulatives to retell a story strengthens language development and reading comprehension. The ability to share the pen with another, communicate clearly, and problem solve in teams has so many benefits. Students need collaborative work now more than ever. Social distancing is taking its toll on student learning, particularly the kind that comes when students work in groups. But how do we bring collaborative learning into a virtual setting this year? I’ve been meeting with teachers around the United States virtually this summer to support them with the implementation of a literacy curriculum that we use at my school, which calls for authentic collaborative work and rich student discourse. In the course of these meetings, I’ve come up with a few ideas for bringing collaboration into a virtual space.

Twenty-eight educators share their thoughts and ideas about what worked for them in the spring, what they’re doing this fall, what worries them, what heartens them and what helps them. We know that this post can’t begin to address all the issues. Some teachers in the United States are going back in person, others will be working with a hybrid model, and some still don’t know for sure. And though these tips focus on engaging middle and high school students online, most educators we know are chiefly worried about those students who don’t have reliable internet at all. Teachers, we hope you’ll help by posting your own comments, and sharing any experiences or tips you have. We hope it will be useful, too, to read the related Times articles that provide the illustrations throughout, such as the May piece “‘I’m Teaching Into a Vacuum’: 14 Educators on Quarantine Learning.”

Out September 1, Bookmarks highlights children’s books written by Black authors, about the Black experience. In each episode, a different celebrity reads one of the books aloud. Sometimes, they visit their own work—as in the case of Lupita Nyong’o, who brings her gorgeously illustrated book Sulwe to life. Then, they follow up the reading with a few thought-provoking questions. Think of it as a book club for parents and tots. With each episode clocking in at five minutes, Bookmarks lends itself to becoming your go-to bedtime story resource. The 12-episode series is designed to simultaneously cultivate young readers, and promote diverse voices in children’s literature—which is exactly the goal of its host, teenage activist Marley Dias.

A lot can happen in two years time, but when you are Marley Dias — founder and author of the social media campaign #1000BlackGirlBooks — somehow that’s on a whole different scale. The last time we talked to Dias, the West Orange, New Jersey, resident was promoting her book, “Marley Dias Gets It Done (And So Can You!).” In the book, she wrote about youth activism, social justice and using social media to make positive changes in communities. Today, the 15-year-old is talking about her new Netflix project, “Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices,” a collection of 12 five-minute episodes featuring Black celebrities and artists reading children’s books by Black authors that highlight the Black experience.

As students shift to remote learning, superintendents nationwide are laying off thousands of paraprofessionals, hourly, mostly low-paid workers often tasked to help students with disabilities. Paraprofessional groups, which have quickly organized protests to denounce the layoffs, have argued their members will be critical in the coming months to help students catch up academically and teachers manage oversized, virtual classrooms. They also argue that paraprofessionals are core elements of special education students’ Individualized Education Programs and that districts could now risk legal challenges from parent advocacy groups.

A mother-son duo is hoping you notice something a little different the next time you visit Little Free Library in Dallas. Rachel and Elliott Koppa launched an effort this summer to put 10 diverse books in Little Free Libraries across the city. “We are trying to hit all 97 of the registered Little Free Libraries in the city of Dallas,” Rachel Koppa said. “We need to see all kinds of different races, and cultures, and religions, and ethnicities so that it broadens our horizons and help us be more open and understanding to the world that we live in,” Rachel said. “I want Elliott to grow up in a kind world.