As 2020 comes to an end, let’s reflect on the year behind us—a year full of new experiences, of meeting and overcoming new challenges. Throughout the year, we published a variety of Literacy Now blog posts to help educators through these tough times.

Here is a list of the top 10 most read Literacy Now blog posts of 2020:

• “Observing Young Readers and Writers: A Tool for Informing Instruction” by Alessandra E. Ward, Nell K. Duke, and Rachel Klingelhofer examines the LTR-WWWP, or The Listening to Reading-Watching White Writing Protocol, a new tool educators can use to assess students’ reading and writing skills when listening to students read aloud and watching them write. The LTR-WWWP is thoroughly explained for readers in this post, along with access to the tool and resources on how to use the tool and what it looks like in action.
• “Reading Rescue: Preventing the COVID-19 Slide With Lessons for Comprehension and Fluency at Home” by Lori Oczkus provides tips for helping students succeed in a virtual learning environment. Oczkus introduces the Fab Four comprehension strategies to improve literacy achievement: predict, question, clarify, and summarize. These strategies can be easily adapted for distance learning and show quick results.
• “Reading On: Free Resources for Virtual Learning” by Morgan Ratner compiled a list of digital resources for enhancing distance learning. Ratner provides resources to books and literacy instruction, community and library programs, and open access published content.
• “Encouraging Independent Reading Remotely in the COVID-19 Era” by Marie Havran suggests multiple ways to encourage students to read independently in a virtual classroom. Hosting a book show-and-tell, inviting guest readers, and encouraging book talks are just a few of the many suggestions that Havran makes.
• “Together Apart: Fostering Collaboration in Remote Learning Environment” by Katy Tarasi addresses collaboration challenges caused by COVID-19 and the need to remove students from the classroom and shift teaching and learning to an online format. Tarasi has come up with novel ways to bring collaboration between students into a virtual work space. By having routines, purposeful learning, modifications, and more, educators can effectively allow students to collaborate from a distance.
• “Meaningful Remote Learning and Literacy Practices During COVID-19” by Katie (Stover) Kelly examines the ways educators around the world have adjusted to teaching virtually, or at least from a distance. Along with this, Kelly provides tips for effective remote learning and meaningful resources for educators to share with their students.
• “Engaging Learning Through Disruptions” is a roundup of a variety of resources compiled at the beginning of sudden move to remote learning earlier this year. In response to having to adapt quickly to online learning because of COVID-19, educators, publishers, and other businesses rushed to provide resources for those who need them.
• “This Is Your Class on Zoom: Videoconference Literacies During COVID Quarantine” by Christy Wessel-Powell and Julie Rust evaluates the different forms of literacies faced when moving to digital learning. Students continued to learn social, digital, and artificial literacies through the obstacles of online and distance learning, and Wessel-Powell and Rust take a deeper dive into what these literacies mean for students and educators in a virtual world.
• “ILA Partners With #KidLit4BlackLives Community” introduces the Facebook Live event “How to Raise and Teach Anti-Racist Kids.” In response to nationwide protests in the United States calling for social action, children’s book author Kwame Alexander set to work organizing virtual town hall discussions. This free digital event, intended for educators and families alike, serves as an important teaching movement in the pursuit for equity in education for all learns.
• “The Importance of a Diverse Classroom Library” by Jerie Blintt examines how, now more than ever, addressing the diversity in our classrooms and how students could be affected by different events is vital. Blintt emphasizes the importance of having diverse classroom materials and introducing kids to learning about empathy.