Literacy Now

by Carrice Cummins

International Literacy Day is being celebrated around the globe as we continue to work towards the universal principle of everyone being able to read. There are currently more than 750 million adults who do not possess appropriate literacy skills and over 100 million children without regular access to education; however, there are also more than 4 billion literate people in the world which is still reason to celebrate. We have come a long way; yet, we have a long way to go.

Though we sometimes think that illiteracy is only an issue of the developing world, literacy is a global issue and we all must recognize the situation and strive to promote and celebrate literacy efforts worldwide as we continuously seek ways to improve literacy rates in every country. So though we understand the need to think globally we must also look closely at what is being done in our own society to improve literacy so that as we grow within, our outreach can also be expanded.

In the United States one of the central elements of our current school-reform movement is the use of college and career-ready standards aka Common Core. These standards play an extremely influential role in what is taught in our schools and in order for these to truly make a difference in the levels of literacy among our students, teachers must understand how to interpret them appropriately to meet the needs of all students – even our neediest children.

Momentarily our panel will share insights on the Common Core and teacher effectiveness – how teachers must strive to strengthen the floor (establish a solid foundation) while raising the ceiling (the levels of literacy required in today’s information age) and doing this not only for the vast majority of our students but all students regardless of background. However, to get us started I would like to point out only a few of the deliberate areas of the standards that we must truly focus on in order to make this happen – those elements most often touched on when teachers talk about common core but in light of our high need student population:

1. Reading more challenging and complex text. An excellent idea but it doesn’t mean that we are going to ask all students to always read more difficult text.  It is a standard that must be addressed with a nuanced and thoughtful approach. Although the standards raise the levels of text complexity only for grades 2-12, reading aloud difficult text at lower grades initiates the development of oral language and comprehension skills so we should not back off from presenting this to our younger students or our high need students. Teachers must provide instructional scaffolding that allows all students to enjoy and benefit from exposure to a wide range of rich texts of varied levels of challenge.
2. Comprehension focused on reading for meaning and purpose - using real texts- both literature and informational text. This involves teachers recognizing that the same logic exists for teaching both types of text – helping students understand what the text says (meaning), as well as, how it was said (structure). Teachers must provide explicit instruction utilizing metacognitive strategies and high levels of student engagement to help students reach this high level of critical reading, especially for students struggling with reading.
3. Emphasis on vocabulary development as a critical component to comprehension and student achievement.  All students need instruction in words and their relationship to other words as well as word-solving strategies; however, teachers of children living in poverty must provide aggressive assistance in order to help them build their vocabularies throughout the day and in all disciplines.
4. Students writing more and for more purposes is an important change from current practice.  Writing is finally considered to be an equal partner to reading; however, the problem is that traditionally teachers have focused on reading achievement as a measure of success and therefore many are now not comfortable teaching writing at this level of intensity. Teachers must begin making the shift to using writing as a means of students clarifying their thinking, digging deeper into text, and responding to text in a variety of formats and for different purposes.

There are of course many other elements of the standards that teachers need to understand and the International Reading Association has commissioned a CCSS committee to develop a set of basic principles to help teachers and school leaders better interpret and ultimately turn the standards into effective instruction. We hope to have these principles ready for dissemination soon but a draft list of the principles to be addressed can be found on the back of your program.

Our focus for this year’s International Literacy Day celebration deals with high need kids, common core standards, and teacher effectiveness. I emphasized a few areas of the common core standards that should be addressed for all students but that might create even more concern for the instruction of our students with greater needs. So does this mean that the standards just for those who come to school ready to learn what we are ready to teach? No, they are indeed for all students, and this means that for our teachers to be effective they are going to need a clear understanding of the standards – what they mean and don’t mean so they can use this understanding to match instruction to the students in their care.

The standards have been met with much trepidation and there are aspects of the standards that we like and aspects that we do not care for. However, there is one aspect of the standards that I am personally proud of and that is the respect they extend to the professional judgment of classroom teachers. The standards tell us what students should know and be able to do but they do not tell us how teachers should teach. So we must celebrate the fact that the standards acknowledge that it is teachers who will make a difference and effective teachers know they make a difference by knowing their children first and using this knowledge to plan their instruction. And while the common core standards are specific to the United States, the goal of all children and youth achieving and meeting high expectations is held worldwide.

In observance of International Literacy Day, Arkansas First Lady Ginger Beebe will join the Alex Foundation and the Arkansas Reading Association to help distribute over 1,000 books.

100 books will be donated both to Our House and Dorcas House for transitional children residents; 100 books will be donated to St. Francis House to establish a library for transitional families; and 400 books will be donated to both Dermott Elementary School library and to CB King Memorial School for special needs children.

Approximately 1,100 recycled and new reading books are made available through purchases made by the Alex Foundation, and 123 new books are made available by its partner, First Book.

Long before she was First Lady of Arkansas, Ginger Beebe volunteered by reading to children to promote literacy, raising awareness about mental-health issues, advocating for people with special needs, and supporting the arts. Her work with the homeless, both individually and through organizations such as Our House in Little Rock, demonstrates her caring spirit. She also works to create better working and living environments for those with special needs, most recently creating an audio tour of the herb garden at the Governor’s Mansion for use by blind and visually impaired visitors. She is a member of the Advisory Board for Women and Children First, and in 2011, she was honored as the organization’s Woman of the Year.

The Alex Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, offers academic scholarship assistance and educational resources for students attending two Arkansas Delta schools, Dermott and McGehee High Schools, as well as Parkview High School in Little Rock. The mission of the Alex Foundation is to engage, engender and enlighten students to pursue careers and entrepreneurial opportunities in architecture, art and mathematics through mentoring, strengthening their capacity, and supporting their educational attainment and continued advancement to meet domestic and global challenges. The Foundation’s efforts are collaborated through a multiple intelligence approach that includes cooperative learning, experiential learning, project-based learning and multidisciplinary learning.

by Clarissa Hardcastle

Join the International Reading Association’s celebration of International Literacy Day on Friday, September 7, 2012, from 10:00 a.m. to noon in the Library of Congress Jefferson Building in Washington, DC. Events will be held in Room 119.

“The impact of illiteracy on our society is sobering," says Marcie Craig Post, Executive Director of the International Reading Association (IRA). "Approximately 50% of the nation’s unemployed youth age 16 to 21 are functionally illiterate, with virtually no prospects of obtaining good jobs, 68% of individuals arrested are illiterate, and about three in five of America’s prison inmates are illiterate. The cost of illiteracy to business and the taxpayer is estimated to be $20 billion a year. On International Literacy Day, IRA renews its commitment to raising awareness and addressing the issues that will facilitate reading and increase literacy around the world.”

Events include IRA President Carrice Cummins, an expert panel on the Common Core State Standards, Center for the Book representatives, Benjamin Franklin, and other guests for a day focusing on worldwide literacy needs.

“There are currently more than 780 million illiterate adults and over 100 million children without regular access to education,” Cummins points out. “However, there are also more than four billion literate people in the world which is still reason to celebrate. International Literacy Day provides us with an opportunity to celebrate our successes while also reminding us of the need to continue sharing our stories and combining our efforts to meet the literacy needs of all people, nationally and internationally. Please join IRA on September 7th, and beyond, as we celebrate teachers making a difference worldwide.”

Also at the event, Rotary International, Pearson Foundation, and IRA will award $2,500 to two literacy projects: Reading Rocks in Rockford and Guatemala Bookmaking. Reading Rocks in Rockford is a festival with a book fair, musicians, and a “Storybook Character Sidewalk Parade” in Rockford, Michigan. Guatemala Bookmaking is a project from the Salem Oregon Rotary Club and the Oregon’s Vineyards Valley Reading Council that serves 130 preschool through sixth grade Mayan children, all of whom speak Cozal Ixil as their first language. An honorable mention goes to “Clothe the Body, Feed the Mind” in Ellensburg, Washington, where Morning Rotary partnered with CentralWORD, the IRA affiliate at Central Washington University, to provide clothing, books, and scholarships for orphans in Juba, South Sudan.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) founded International Literacy Day in 1967. Though International Literacy Day is traditionally observed annually on September 8, IRA will be celebrating a day earlier since this year that date falls on a Saturday.

IRA councils, affiliates, and individual members have observed International Literacy Day in the past with themed readings in libraries and local schools, supporting national and international literacy programs, and other independent projects.

IRA’s Engage Teacher to Teacher blog will feature Literacy Day-related content leading up to the event. Teacher and author L.P. Simone shares teaching tips about the need for titles featuring Latino/a children that are not "barrio" or migrant-worker specific on Tuesday, Mrs. Mimi pens her popular “QUIET: Teacher in Progress” column on Wednesday, author Monika Schroeder (Saraswati’s Way) discusses education in India in her “In Other Words” piece on Thursday, and we interview author Nancy Shaw about Elena’s Story (part of Sleeping Bear Press’ “Tales of the World” series) about a Guatemalan girl who is the first in her family to learn to read.

To attend the 2012 International Literacy Day celebration in Washington, DC, or to learn more about this annual event, visit /ILD.

Reading Rocks in Rockford included read-alouds by Local celebrity Maranda of WOTV 8.

Dr. Seuss book characters promote literacy at Reading Rocks in Rockford.

Mayan teachers in Oregon are proud of the books they wrote in the Cozal Ixil language.

Oregon students are excited to read their new Cozal Ixil books.

Clarissa Hardcastle is the strategic communications department intern at the International Reading Association.

The International Reading Association invites newly published authors of books for ages preschool to 17 to enter their first or second book into the IRA Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Award competition by November 1, 2012.

Awards are given for fiction and nonfiction in each of three categories: primary, intermediate, and young adult. Books from all countries and published in English for the first time during the 2012 calendar year will be considered.

The 2013 award winners will be encouraged to attend the awards ceremony held at IRA’s 58th Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas, April 19-22, 2013.

The 2012 recipients included: Stephen Savage for Where's Walrus? from Scholastic (Primary Fiction category), Sheila O'Connor for Sparrow Road from Putnam (Intermediate Fiction category), Lucy Christopher for Flyaway from Chicken House/Scholastic (Intermediate Fiction category), Ruta Sepetys for Between Shades of Gray from Philomel (Young Adult Fiction), Jeanne Walker Harvey for My Hands Sing the Blues: Romare Bearden's Childhood Journey from Marshall Cavendish (Primary Nonfiction category), and Georgia Bragg for How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous from Walker (Young Adult Nonfiction).

Visit the IRA Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Award webpage for a list of past winners, guidelines, and the application.

IRA 2012 Research Award Recipients

Awards and Grants from the International Reading Association

Join the International Reading Association

International Reading Association and Greater 1000 Islands Literacy Council member Sarah Parker Ada came up with a new way to promote the New York State Reading Association annual conference on October 28-30 in Liverpool.

In her YouTube video entitled “Read it Maybe (NYSRA 2012)” she encourages her community to read by parodying the popular song “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. In the video, she changes Jepsen’s “here’s my number, so call me maybe” lyrics to “here's a book, now, so read it maybe.” The video was filmed in various locations, including the Roswell P. Flower Memorial Library in Watertown, New York. 

“I go to the Flower Memorial Library and check out books there all the time,” Ada shares in an article in the Watertown Daily Times. “Growing up, I always loved ‘Weird Al.’ I’ve chosen two songs that are pretty popular with teens. It’s speaks to kids more. It gets them more into it.”

Earlier this year, Ada posted a YouTube video entitled “If You Love to Read (NYSRA 2012)” which has received over 13,000 views. It is a parody of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” changing “We could have had it all; (You're gonna wish you never had met me); rolling in the deep; (tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)” to “You can have it all; (I really wish you, you would read to me); if you love to read; (pages gonna turn, when you love to read).” 

Ada also plays a news anchor in the “NYSRA 2012 Conference Update” video on the NYSRA website.

Ada is an adjunct professor for freshman composition at Jefferson Community College and is getting a degree in secondary English education, which she describes as her passion.

“I’m hoping to do more videos like this,” she says.

We hope so too!

International Reading Association Councils and Affiliates

Join the International Reading Association

International Reading Association Annual Convention