Today’s Literacy Headlines

Whether or not a child comprehends what she is reading depends primarily on how much background knowledge and vocabulary she brings to the task. This background knowledge is also known as “schema,” and students will be better readers of new material if adults and teachers have helped them expand their knowledge about the subject, whether it be science, history, literature or the arts. So, how can we help our children learn that essential background knowledge that will improve their reading comprehension? We can increase our children’s access to schema by talking, talking, talking to them about all kinds of subjects.

The Austintown library partnered with the United Way for the Imagine With Us program. The program is part of the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, which has been sponsored through the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County in conjunction with the United Way since 2014. Josephine Nolfi, the Youth Services and Programming Director with the public library, said that the importance lies not in having a lot of books, but in the child’s ability to comprehend them. “It’s not a question of how many books are in the home, it’s a question of having adults in the home who know how to share those books in developmentally appropriate ways to maximize the learning that goes along with the various stages of brain development,” Nolfi said. That’s when the library and United Way developed the Imagine With Us program, which aims to teach parents skills to help their child develop strong early literacy skills.

If we want to harness the potential power of homework—particularly for disadvantaged students—we’ll need to educate teachers about what kind of assignments actually work. For example, there’s something called “retrieval practice,” which means trying to recall information you’ve already learned. The optimal time to engage in retrieval practice is not immediately after you’ve acquired information but after you’ve forgotten it a bit—like, perhaps, after school. A homework assignment could require students to answer questions about what was covered in class that day without consulting their notes. Research has found that retrieval practice and similar learning strategies are far more powerful than simply rereading or reviewing material. But first, we’ll need to start teaching kids something substantive about the world, beginning as early as possible.

The living room may not have been what New York City’s mayor had in mind a year ago when he ran for re-election on the ambitious promise of free preschool for all of the city’s 3-year-olds. That door is now open. New York City recently introduced a plan that would bring 3-K into home-based childcare. It’s a move that other cities and districts are likely to watch closely. The school district is the nation’s largest. There is no playbook for how to effectively include home-based childcare in public preschool, and most programs have relied on schools and centers. (Home-based childcare is also known as family childcare or group family daycare.) In a recent report, the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School explored the opportunities and challenges that home-based childcare presents for the city’s evolving 3-K program.

When it comes to teachable ­moments, nothing beats commemorative dates. The new year will bring some monumental 50th anniversaries, including the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. If you’re looking for summer programming or planning ahead for the fall, now is the time to go back a half century. There were two very different historical events and two equally distinct book publications in 1969. Each had a powerful and lasting impact and each deserves its continued legacy. The challenge, of course, is to make them relevant to today. These events and titles can lend themselves to crosscurricular lessons and projects. The calendar has offered a gift this year—don’t miss the opportunity.

Writers: how often have you been told to “write what you know”? Generic writing advice is so often repeated it’s become a joke in the New Yorker. But do young or emerging writers feel boxed-in when they hear the same lessons over and over again that prioritize certain kinds of writing styles? Today on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, we’ll explore what it takes to write fiction, and what resources the Washington region has for new writers. One of our guests, Zachary Clark, leads 826DC, a nonprofit chapter that provides writing support to young Washingtonians. Check out Zachary’s writing advice, and leave your own in the comments section!

Children should have equal access to a high-quality education. If you provide students and families with a broad range of options—including charter schools, private schools, and traditional public schools—they can choose the one that best suits them. In theory, the schools would compete with one another, vying for students, and the competition itself would spur them all to improve. Ideally, that competition is open to all students equally, as it is that sort of open free-for-all that ought to produce the best results. Of course, for this to work, parents need to know about the options available to them. Research has shown that there are significant barriers to choice, among them access to transportation, enrollment issues, and a lack of information about the schools. A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research adds another dimension to this problem: Schools themselves may play a role in encouraging more “desirable” students to enroll, meaning that often it’s more the schools choosing the students than the reverse.

In the last 20 years, dual language (DL) programs––which provide instruction in two languages and aim for students to become bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural––have become increasingly popular in the U.S. Despite the growing popularity of DL programs throughout the country, language and education policies at all levels—federal, state, local—are still needed. Policies that support DL education are pivotal to implement and sustain these programs effectively. The Center for Applied Linguistics recently released Profiles in Dual Language Education, which examines the characteristics of effective DL program implementation, its challenges, and opportunities.

While I suspect some of you are quite sick of them, for me a truly fun part of the new year is stopping to look back at the bounty of the past year’s discoveries in the form of best lists. Many of our friends–reviewers, publishers, bloggers, etc.–have been hard at work collecting their picks for best-of-the-year across media formats. So, I thought it would be handy to gather them together in the form of a little curated list of best lists.

Jack Silva didn’t know anything about how children learn to read. What he did know is that a lot of students in his district were struggling. Silva is the chief academic officer Bethlehem, Pa., public schools. In 2015, only 56 percent of third graders were scoring proficient on the state reading test. That year, he set out to do something about that. “It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘Which 4 in 10 students don’t deserve to learn to read?‘ “he recalls. Bethlehem is not an outlier. Across the country, millions of kids are struggling. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32 percent of fourth-graders and 24 percent of eighth-graders aren’t reading at a basic level. Fewer than 40 percent are proficient or advanced.

Whether it’s a word problem in math or a vocabulary assignment, reading is the glue that holds the entire educational process together. Yet it’s estimated that up to 20 percent of students have dyslexia or another language-based learning disability that makes decoding letters on a page challenging. A new app created at Boston Children’s Hospital is focused on screening children at younger ages to find out if they’re at risk for developing a reading problem. Nadine Gaab, an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s and the Harvard Medical School, developed the app. “The child is assessed on six different components. At the end, we know whether the early literacy milestones that the children need in order to successfully learn to read are there, or whether they need more help,” she said.

Whether you’re a Gryffindor, a Hufflepuff, a Ravenclaw, a Slytherin or a muggle still hoping your Hogwarts letter will arrive by owl, it is undeniable that the Harry Potter fandom has had a lasting impact throughout the world. September marked the 20th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’s U.S. release. NPR asked teachers then to tell us how the book has changed the way they teach. We learned that a lot has changed since 1998. Quidditch is no longer just game of fantasy. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is more than a textbook to pick up in Diagon Alley. And Hogwarts is no longer a place you can only dream of visiting. More than 1,000 educators, from elementary teachers to university professors, responded to NPR’s callout with stories about how they incorporate the Harry Potter series into their curriculum and classrooms.

For kids, winter breaks are an opportunity to browse library shelves. But children’s books also play a big role shaping the way children see the world beyond their immediate family and community. Picture books that reflect different experiences can help “affirm students’ experiences and identities,” write Sanjuana Rodriguez and Eliza Braden in the Journal of Children’s Literature, and they also have the potential to help kids reflect on difficult experiences, such as immigration and xenophobia. In the Global Nation Exchange, our public forum on Facebook focused on immigration and diversity, we’re thinking about what matters when picking out a book for younger readers.

Winter break is a perfect time to catch up on some special education articles that you may have missed in 2018. Here’s a list of some articles that grabbed readers’ attention in the past 12 months. Why Special Educators Really Leave the Classroom: Hands down, more people read this article than anything else I wrote this year. Several months later, I wrote additional stories that extend the theme: Shortage of Special Educators Leads to Classroom Pressures and Special Education Plagued by Faulty Teacher Data. In the teacher data story, I particularly want to draw attention to the work of Paul Sindelar, a special education professor at the University of Florida, and his colleagues. They’ve done research on the difference between states that have large teacher shortages compared to states that have smaller shortages. Unsurprisingly, teachers in low-shortage states are paid more, have smaller class sizes, and spend more per pupil.

2018 has been a fascinating year in education research. If support for federal education studies at times seemed a bit touch-and-go this year because of funding threats and White House plans to merge agencies, there were still plenty of meaty findings for practitioners. In fact, of all the research stories reported this year, readers were most interested in a look at how more than 90,000 principals guide improvement in their schools. Some of the findings are likely common knowledge—effective school leaders set high expectations for students and staff alike and support teams of teachers working to hone instruction—but it also offered some surprising tidbits, such as the need for principals to make sure parents opt out, rather than opt into parent engagement.

Research has found that phonics, which helps children crack the code of how letters represent speech sounds, is crucial to teaching reading. But in New York City, educators say too many schools don’t know how to instill the basics.

The research is all but irrefutable: Parents of very young children who talk to, read and engage with them as often as possible help them build literacy skills at an early age – an educational foundation that can give kids a jump-start on future academic success. Also certain: Parents of very young children usually have to do a lot of laundry. And low-income families tend to bring their kids with them to public laundromats. Those truths converge once a week at select neighborhood laundromats in Chicago. That’s when librarians from one of the nation’s largest library systems lay down colorful mats, oversized board books and musical shakers beside the industrial washing machines and wire laundry baskets. Inside one of about 14 laundromats in the city’s low-income neighborhoods, the librarians gather all available children for Laundromat Story Time, a Chicago Public Library program that combines early education principles with public outreach and a dash of parental modeling.

Kids who enjoy reading are likely to turn into adults who regularly read for pleasure. Regular reading also improves literacy and stands children in good stead for high school and college, where they’ll do plenty of it as they study. So, how do you get kids to pick up a book when modern technology is such a distraction? Children aren’t born voracious readers, but you can help instill excellent reading habits from an early age. Try these seven ways to encourage kids to read more.

Audrey Geisel, the widow of the children’s author Theodor Geisel — better known as Dr. Seuss — and the overseer of his estate and guardian of his legacy since his death in 1991, died on Wednesday at her home in San Diego. She was 97. Before Mr. Geisel died, he told his wife that she would be in charge of all the creatures he had created, including the Cat in the Hat, Horton the elephant and the Grinch. Taking care of them became her mission. She developed and oversaw a global operation of publishing ventures, film projects, games and celebrations that kept Dr. Seuss’ name, and his beloved stories, in front of successive generations of children as they learned to read. She was deeply involved in the marketing and managing of all his material. Some people complained that her aggressive commercialism went beyond the wishes of her very private husband.

In anticipation of our coverage of Black History Month, here are 42 nonfiction and poetry titles from 2018—and a few spring 2019 books, too. Add these selections, from board books to YA memoirs, to your collection and display year-round.

Playing is one of the five early literacy practices that prepare children for reading. Children learn thru all of their senses and what better way to learn than through playing. Playing gives a child a chance to explore new ideas, improve physical abilities, learn social skills, as well as the basics of storytelling, and problem-solving. Playing is the theme in the new books below and it introduces all of the different ways for children to explore their environment. Read these fun and playful stories with children and embark on an adventure of learning how to play all over again. Visit your local Fort Worth Library for these great new reads and even more!

Montana is one of three states that has no laws relating to dyslexia, a disability that makes reading and sometimes writing difficult. For state Sen. Cary Smith, R-Billings, who has a granddaughter diagnosed with dyslexia, the issue “is very close to me.” Smith plans to introduce a bill or bills pertaining to dyslexia in the 2019 legislative session. t’s been a long time coming, says Kelly Fedge DuBose, Bozeman founder and leader of Decoding Dyslexia Montana. The organization offers support to parents of dyslexic children and seeks to raise awareness of the learning disability among policy-makers in education and government.

If you have kids and wonder if all that time they spend on their smartphones endlessly scrolling, snapping and texting is affecting their brains, you might want to put down your own phone and pay attention. The federal government, through the National Institutes of Health, has launched the most ambitious study of adolescent brain development ever attempted. In part, scientists are trying to understand what no one currently does: how all that screen time impacts the physical structure of your kids’ brains, as well as their emotional development and mental health. At 21 sites across the country scientists have begun interviewing nine and ten-year-olds and scanning their brains. They’ll follow more than 11,000 kids for a decade, and spend $300 million doing it. Dr. Gaya Dowling of the National Institutes of Health gave us a glimpse of what they’ve learned so far.

Watch 3-year-olds at play and you’ll see them building. On the beach, it’s a sandcastle encircled by a moat. In the classroom, it’s a towering edifice constructed of cardboard or blocks. Yet as natural as it comes to the youngest school goers, engineering hasn’t been incorporated into the preschool and kindergarten curricula the way it has in the upper grades. The “e” in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) has been largely missing for the youngest learners, at least in any significant way. New engineering curricula developed by the Museum of Science in Boston aims to change that. The museum has developed and tested lesson plans for preschoolers (Wee Engineer) and kindergartners (Engineering is Elementary for Kindergarten). The preschool curriculum includes four challenges (such as building the noisiest noisemaker) that give students practice with a three-step design process: explore, create, improve. The kindergarten curriculum includes more complex challenges (such as building a trash collector) that guide students through a five-step design process: ask, imagine, plan, create, improve.

Traveling library lovers, the website of your dreams has arrived. Christian Lauersen and Marie Engberg Eiriksson launched Library Planet, “a crowdsourced Lonely Planet for libraries,” in early December. The website is as visual as it is informative, already full of beautiful travel photography centered on the library with submissions about the “beautiful and cool libraries.” In addition to learning about the spaces themselves, people are writing in about why they love their local library, why they want to visit libraries when they travel, and even go off on library-related tangents about funding and other issues.

Today’s crop of books is for the 9-12 year old crowd, but that’s flexible. You might know an 8-year-old that finds P.G. Wodehouse sublime or a 16-year-old that sneaks Captain Underpants books at night. Whatever the case, no matter how badly things go, there is room for humor in our world. Sometimes, we need it more desperately than anyone would care to admit.

From cybersecurity to school safety, privacy to personalized learning, and social media to media literacy, it’s been a busy 12 months on the education-technology beat. Here are a dozen of Education Week’s biggest K-12 technology stories of the year, rounded up for your holiday reading pleasure.

Since 2002, Neal Porter Books, formerly at Macmillan, has established itself as one of the highest quality picture book imprints in the United States and around the world. This fall, Porter published Yuyi Morales’s Dreamers, his debut title at Holiday House, the imprint’s new home. It is a timely and passionate autobiographical work about the Caldecott Honoree’s immigrant experience. I caught up with Neal in October to talk about the past, present, and future. “First and foremost, I approach artists I admire and those I think would be interesting to work with, regardless of ethnicity or cultural heritage. And those include Yuyi Morales, Jerry Pinkney, Shane Evans, Christian Robinson, Jason Chin, and others. The choice of material is of course influenced by the profound need to have more children’s books that reflect the diversity of those reading them.”

When is the best time for a child to get a card, and what do age policies look like in public libraries? We surveyed 150 library professionals via library listservs and social media. The majority (68 percent) of libraries reported that children can get library cards from birth. The remaining 32 percent reported a variety of policies, usually age or grade limits, including 6.2 percent requiring children to be able to write their names on the application. Baby-friendly card policies encourage early literacy and library use from birth, librarians report. Offering cards to babies also sends a powerful message to parents: Reading with them is important. Many libraries offer “Baby’s First Library Card” with child-friendly branding.

Teacher-led read-alouds and in-school independent reading—the cornerstones of effective literacy instruction—have the power and promise to set students on a path of lifelong reading, according to research highlighted by the International Literacy Association’s (ILA) recent brief, The Power and Promise of Read-Alouds and Independent Reading. For many U.S. students, in-school time is their only encoun­ter with books, says ILA. As instructional time is increasingly devoted to content coverage and standardized test prepara­tion, less time is available for in-school reading. As a result, the reading habits of young adults have sharply declined over the past two decades. The brief stresses the responsibility of schools and educators to allocate more instructional time and resources to well-stocked classroom libraries and to preparing teachers to engage in ef­fective, interactive read-alouds.

As part of the federal recovery effort to boost the economy after the 2008 recession, the U.S. Education Department suddenly had a big pot of money to give away to “innovations” in education. Since then, more than $1.5 billion has been spent on almost 200 ideas because Congress continued to appropriate funds even after the recession ended. In order to obtain the grants, recipients had to determine if their ideas were effective by tracking test scores. Results are in for the first wave of 67 programs, representing roughly $700 million of the innovation grants and it doesn’t look promising. Only 12 of the 67 innovations, or 18 percent, were found to have any positive impact on student achievement, according to a report published earlier in 2018.

The Denver Public Library has releases its list of the Best and Brightest Children’s Books for 2018. The list was created by a team of 25 librarians who read year-round to find the best books for kids ranging from toddlers to teens. “There’s something for every age group,” said Amy Forrester, a children’s librarian with the Denver Public Library. “The books are not just well-written or masterfully illustrated, but books we think speak to the diversity and interests of kids in Denver.” Forrester said there are also a lot of books on the list for kids in kindergarten to 3rd grade who are developing their reading skills.

Scholastic is joining forces with the Yale Child Study Center to eventually create resources, programs, professional development, and curriculum to support children and families. The Yale Child Study Center–Scholastic Collaborative for Child & Family Resilience is a forum for researchers, educators, health care professionals, families, and community members to “advance progress towards improving academic and mental health outcomes.” It will focus research on the “intersection of literacy and health across education content areas, including early childhood, social emotional learning and teaching, equity and social justice, family and community engagement.” It will also act as a forum for researchers, educators, healthcare professionals, families, and community members to share ideas.

The magic of literacy can happen at any time, but it is especially important in childhood. Reading helps a young child’s brain develop and mature. Reading for pleasure is a lifelong gift of entertainment and learning. Today, in memory of my mother on her birthday, I joyfully share a simple idea that adults can easily adopt in order to give the children in their lives the gift my mother gave to me, by putting “a book on every bed.” Here’s what to do: On Christmas morning (or whatever holiday you celebrate), make sure that each child in your household wakes up to a wrapped book at the foot of their bed. The gift could be a new book or an old favorite from your own childhood. After the child unwraps the book, the most important aspect of this gift is unveiled, when the parent sits and shares it with the child.

For schools looking for ways to squeeze in more instructional time for young learners, preschool and kindergarten nap time can be a tempting target. But emerging sleep research suggests cutting out the afternoon snooze can come at the expense of some children’s longer-term ability to remember what they learn. There’s no nationwide data on how many students nap in school.

Rather than focusing primarily on what students need to know, we should instead focus on how they learn. Understanding exactly how automaticity develops — thereby opening the door to reading fluency and comprehension— can provide a window into more effective reading pedagogy. Fortunately, research in cognitive science has already identified powerful principles of learning to help us get to answers for these and other important questions.

As English teachers, we often wonder how we can get students to love reading outside of mere class assignments. In Griffin, high school English teacher Onessia Mosby has opened the world’s doors for students through her classroom library. As a district curriculum coordinator, I visited her class and saw teenagers enthralled in reading various novels—some silently reading, some discussing with partners. I learned from her four tips that fostered this level of engagement.

Interestingly, 2018 turned out to be a very strong year for these books. Why? Well, look closely and you’ll see that this is nothing so much as a gathering of small publishers. It’s like I always say, the more the big guys consolidate, the more cracks and fissures appear for the little folks to sneak through. Here then are the titles published in 2018 that really stood out and shone.

How Javion became a high school student reading at the second-grade level is impossible to say for sure. But multiple forces play a role: Intergenerational poverty and violence abetted by segregation and disinvestment that have strangled opportunities for black families in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Underperforming schools concentrated in underserved communities. A special education system that avoided serving students. A patchwork approach to literacy instruction. And thousands upon thousands of students like Javion, who have endured deep, searing losses and trauma.

Next month, 20 new governors and 16 re-elected governors will start their terms. Many of them made early-childhood education a part of their campaigns, and the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report with recommendations for an early-childhood agenda for these new leaders in 2019. The report calls for the creation of a combined office of early-childhood education that would include everything from health and human services to labor and employment. It also proposes that governors appoint an early-learning advisor to show their commitment to the cause. CAP calls for governors to include early-childhood education in their state of the state addresses and in their budgets. Under long-term goals, governors are advised to provide full-day universal preschool for all three- and four-year-old children and to provide high-quality, affordable child-care for all families.

In “Hey, Kiddo,” Krosoczka celebrates his grandparents, who made the choice to raise him as their own son as his mother struggled with addiction. In the memoir, a National Book Award finalist, he brings to life his upbringing with a muted ink palette featuring only flashes of burnt orange – the color of one of his late grandfather’s pocket squares that now serves as a safety blanket for one of Krosoczka’s daughters. From writing his memoir to starting a national lunch lady appreciation day (one of his series features a crime-fighting cafeteria worker), the author regularly makes the case for gratitude: A thank-you reminds both giver and receiver of their importance and connection to others.

Turns out, it’s really hard to be instructive without being didactic. You want to get what you’re trying to say across in a way that’s simple enough for a child to understand without essentially whacking them over the head with the message. In 2018 people cranked up the notch on Message Books. Make no mistake, we’ve always had book that discuss feminism or equity, but they often would do so obliquely. But if 2018 is remembered for anything it will be for the year that subtlety took a hike and probably won’t be due back for a while. Here then are the Message Books of the year that tackled the challenge of instructing or informing the young with aplomb.

Literacy experts tell us that reading and writing skills begin with the language skills of speaking and listening. As children develop language, their skills grow more and more refined. So, in the early years, even though they may be using words, they are not necessarily hearing the individual sounds in words—the phonemes. We can help our children develop their phonemic awareness, and the best way is to play games with them as part of regular, daily routines. Michigan State University Extension has gathered a few games that can easily be played when you are waiting in line at the grocery store, riding in the car or just hanging around.

Children who use smartphones, tablets, and video games more than seven hours a day are more likely to experience premature thinning of the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain that processes thought and action, according to a new study released by the National Institutes of Health. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study tested 4,500 9-10-year-olds in its first released dataset. The ABCD study is the largest long-term study of brain development in U.S. children to date and has recruited over 11,875 participants, meeting its goal.

I think I love children’s books more than most children. I could spend hours in bookstores and libraries, getting lost in the whimsical story lines and illustrations. Now that I am a mother of two young girls, I find particular joy in introducing them to my all-time favorite characters—Ferdinand, Ms. Frizzle, Amelia Bedelia—and in discovering new stories that are quickly becoming their classics. From a meditation on the importance of being quiet and still to a rhyming exploration of the diversity of life on Earth, my favorite books this year are ones with messages that help kids understand and interact in the world around them.

Thousands of public schools across the country aren’t using 504 plans, according to a new analysis. On the flip side, some public schools actively use them. In some schools, as many as 20 to 30 percent of students have 504 plans. This analysis raises concerns about why the use of 504 plans varies so much. Nationally, around 2.3 percent of students have 504 plans. That percentage has been rising since 2009, when Congress expanded who qualifies for the plans. But it doesn’t tell the whole story about what’s happening at the local level. That’s why Professor Perry Zirkel of Lehigh University decided to look at local schools. He worked with the U.S. government’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) from the 2015–2016 academic year. The CRDC is a biennial survey on public schools across the country.

In recent years, more state-sponsored early-childhood education programs have called on teachers to obtain four-year degrees and additional training. But a study released this month raises some key questions about what is known about the quality of these teacher preparation programs. “The research suggests that we don’t know what a high-quality, early-child program looks like, so there’s no guarantee that if an early educator goes through a degree program that it will improve their practice,” said Ashley LiBetti, an associate partner with Bellwether Education Partners and the author of the study, “Let the Research Show.” LiBetti argues that early-childhood, teacher-preparation programs are operating in the dark when it comes to basic information such as best practices where program content and design are concerned.

Let’s define our terms a bit here. When I say that something is a “bilingual book” I can mean one of two things. I might be saying that the book contains two languages in the text or I might mean that the book was simultaneously published alongside another version in another language. Oh, and there’s a third possibility. Sometimes a book in English will be published in a new language in a subsequent year. I count them all! As far as I can ascertain, the more the merrier. With that in mind, here are the bilingual title I found particularly toothsome in 2018. Each and every one quite cool. Each and every one a keeper.

“Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?” Audiobook sales have doubled in the last five years while print and e-book sales are flat. These trends might lead us to fear that audiobooks will do to reading what keyboarding has done to handwriting — rendered it a skill that seems quaint and whose value is open to debate. But examining how we read and how we listen shows that each is best suited to different purposes, and neither is superior. In fact, they overlap considerably. Consider why audiobooks are a good workaround for people with dyslexia: They allow listeners to get the meaning while skirting the work of decoding, that is, the translation of print on the page to words in the mind. Although decoding is serious work for beginning readers, it’s automatic by high school, and no more effortful or error prone than listening. Once you’ve identified the words (whether by listening or reading), the same mental process comprehends the sentences and paragraphs they form.

Fueled by technological advances, changing state policies, and a continued push from advocates, ed-tech companies and researchers are crafting new tools and strategies to better serve students with disabilities. Underlying a range of new trends, experts say, is a growing recognition that designing learning resources from the beginning with students with disabilities in mind can benefit all students. Education Week canvassed the field for insights on new developments in the use of technology to support special education. Some promising technologies, such as virtual reality, are still very much in the experimental stage. Some segments of the K-12 sector, such as the burgeoning “Computer Science for All” movement, are hustling to make up for past oversights. And some experts are sounding cautionary notes.

As a teacher, father and children’s book author, Jon Scieszka avoids books full of lessons. “Since the beginning of kids’ books … it was like: learn your alphabet, learn the colors, or learn morals, learn proper behavior,” he says. But the author of the kids’ classic The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales says books for small readers don’t need big lessons. Ahead of the holidays, All Things Considered is inviting writers to talk about the books they’ll be gifting to friends and family this year. Here’s what Scieszka has for the kids on his list.