Literacy Now

Being in Boston for the ILA 2016 conference was an extremely exciting learning opportunity for me. Although I had to travel more than 5,000 miles from Nigeria—and I was seven months pregnant at the time—it was worth every second.

I crossed several hurdles, including fundraising to cover expenses so I could attend—and present on the work of my social enterprise, Magical Books—but it’s the sessions I attended and resources I received that made the conference so memorable.

It has all aided my work with children over this past year in a country where reading for pleasure is not often promoted and most students read simply to pass exams. I aim to change that, and so I can’t wait to return for ILA 2017 to again be among so many like-minded literacy educators.

At the general session last year, I listened to Adora Svitak talk about the power of literature in teaching empathy and to Kwame Alexander talk about how to make poetry relatable, enjoyable, and accessible for children. I am also glad to have attended Pernille Ripp’s session on strategies to engage all learners, mainly that students shouldn’t be compelled to use reading logs, as this stifles the fun and limits the number/volume of books they want to read.

Teaching practices and instructional strategies that position students closer to reading and writing excellence by Kelly Gallagher was another session that inspired me. Now, I allow children to make their choice regarding the books they want to read irrespective of the volume and also model through mentor texts how students can be better writers. In addition, I take time to confer with students on their progress and challenges, to engage them with high-interest topics, to give lots of low-pressure ungraded writing, to write alongside them, and to encourage them to write for an audience.

Tiffany Todd’s session “60 Apps in 60 Minutes” was very engaging and eye opening. In fact, we were able to make a list of 100 apps. I was probably familiar with about two before the session, but now I know about Story Creator, Quizlet, AutoRap, readwritethink.org, africanstorybook.org, and 95 others.

I found the session “From Phonics to Fluency to Proficient Reading” by Timothy Rasinski enlightening, especially because at Magical Books, we organize literacy clinics for struggling readers. One of the things I learned was that automaticity and increase in reading speed is gained through reading more and often. I have also found the “making and working words” and “vocabulary ladders” lesson plans very useful in improving students’ reading level and vocabulary.

I continue to be excited by the resources I received and, most important, the network of literacy educators I met and still communicate with. The ILA conference was a great learning experience that opened up so many opportunities beyond my national borders—and it could do exactly the same for you.

Oluwaseun Aina, an ILA member since 2015, holds a master’s degree in communication and language arts from University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She is the founder of Magical Books, a social enterprise that promotes literacy among children and young adults. She was included on ILA’s first-ever 30 under 30 list in 2015.

Imagine being at a party where the food, the drinks, the music, and the room to mingle were each in a separate location. You probably wouldn’t really appreciate any of the individual parts as much if you had to keep switching gears from one to the other. Having everything together creates a more enjoyable experience.

Integrating subjects has a similar effect in classrooms. When we were students, school seemed so departmentalized, each subject taught in isolation from the others. As we innovate our teaching, we look to our experiences as adults and think about how we can help our students to see the world through many lenses and use a variety of skills to interpret a situation.

When academic content is integrated, students explore a concept or skill repeatedly through the day in different ways and through various lenses, allowing for broader application of the individual skills and a greater conceptual understanding of the world.

Once you start blurring the lines and teaching to the conceptual understanding rather than compartmentalizing reading and writing, the questions often become, How do I incorporate the individual subject skills required to reach that understanding? Where does reading fluency, envisioning, sentence structure, etc., live in the integrated curriculum? It means taking a step back and looking at the big picture, thinking about your year, your students, and purpose, and then rolling up your sleeves and digging in. It might get messy; you might be uncomfortable. But don’t worry, the skills are embedded and purposefully taught within the genre. If you have the flexibility to design your scope, sequence, and units, you are ready to dive in.

What if my year is preplanned? Well, here you’ll need to gather all of the small pieces, or skills, and create the Big Idea from them. For example, if your sequence calls for teaching quotation marks and the proper placement of the comma, you can build a narrative unit around those skills and look deeply at reading and writing literature that is full of dialogue. As the students repeatedly encounter dialogue and use it in authentic situations, they will build more mastery.

When integration is done well, you will enhance your students’ conceptual understanding of real-life topics while still teaching reading and writing skills. It sounds hard, but there are many resources out there. You can begin with Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe; Thinking Through Genre by Heather Lattimer; and The Reading Strategies Book and The Writing Strategies Book, both by Jennifer Serravallo.

Bonnie Greenwald, a literacy liaison and learning specialist, works with teachers to guide their practice and create and modify curricula in order to optimize learning for a range of students through a developmentally appropriate, integrated curriculum.

Anacarla Schelino, a lead teacher and literacy specialist, has worked at The School at Columbia University since 2005. Throughout her 20 years of teaching in public, charter, and independent schools, she has supported teachers’ and students’ learning of project-based curriculum that integrates a variety of disciplines.

Bonnie Greenwald and Anacarla Schelino will present a workshop titled “Reading and Writing in the Integrated Classroom” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Over the last two decades, thousands of exemplary kindergarten and first-grade teachers have found a pathway to reading success by encouraging and supporting invented spelling—a child’s self-directed and often spontaneous attempts to represent words in print. Teachers can analyze invented spelling, or “kid writing,” to monitor progress in reading, spelling, phonics, and making meaning. Invented spelling provides a footprint of what’s happening in the child’s brain as he or she moves from lower developmental phases to higher, more sophisticated phases on his or her individual journey to breaking the English code.  

A 2017 research study by two Canadian cognitive psychologists, Gene Ouellette and Monique Sénéchal, demonstrated a causal connection between invented spelling and reading success. The study determined that children who invented spelling from the beginning became better conventional spellers. Ouellette and Sénéchal also found invented spelling to be even more effective than phonemic awareness instruction or alphabet instruction alone. A newly released book entitled Kid Writing in the 21^st Century (Feldgus, Cardonick, & Gentry, 2017) shows how this research supports best classroom practice and outlines the five basic steps to kid writing:

• 1. Drawing: Have kids draw their story or draw their information in a quick sketch.
• 2. Kid writing: Encourage children to write their story or information however they choose—from scribbling in Phase 0 to spelling sounds in chunks of phonics or syllable patterns. Everyday writing helps beginning writers build an internal dictionary of correct spellings while they joyfully engage in authentic writing for their own purposes. There are no worksheets. Letter of the week is abandoned. Kid writing becomes a powerful vehicle for data collection and monitoring progress.
• 3. Teacher publishing for reading and rereading: The child reads and rereads his or her story or information from a teacher-published conventional model often attached below the kid writing. Having the child read back his or her own writing in conventional English integrates the child’s invented spelling into a meaningful reading and fluency lesson. This model is a good fit for writing workshop with emphasis on social interaction.
• 4. Focused mini-lessons: Mini-lessons are used in whole group, small group, and individual conferences based on children’s needs.
• 5. Sharing: Includes quick shares and publication for motivation and success.

So which came first—the chicken or the egg? Was it research that came first in the researchers’ landmark discovery or was it best practice? In this case, exemplary beginning literacy teachers followed early educational research and through collaboration and sharing discovered best practice two decades before cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. In Ouellette and Sénéchal’s words, these practices provided “a unique predictor of growth in early reading skills, over and above children’s alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness.”

J. Richard Gentry, Ph.D., is an internationally acclaimed author, researcher, and educational consultant known for his groundbreaking work in early literacy, spelling, and dyslexia. He has authored sixteen books, two textbook series, and numerous journal and magazine articles. Gentry currently blogs for Psychology Today. His latest book co-authored with Eileen Feldgus and Isabell Cardonick is Kid Writing in the 21st Century: A Systematic Approach to Phonics, Spelling, and Writing Workshop (Hameray Publishing Group, 2017).

Flashback to the summer of 1989.

I was four years old, and my father had finally managed to secure a hard-won student visa to study at Louisiana State University. While my mother and I waited for our chance to join him, I lived with my aunt and cousin in Beijing, a few miles away from Tiananmen Square, the heart of China’s government.

For many at the time, Tiananmen Square was the epicenter of a rising democratic movement breaking out all across the country. Throughout the spring of 1989, hundreds of thousands of young university students had gathered in the square to raise their voices against the government.

For me, the massive crowd in Tiananmen Square was a tourist attraction. We didn’t have much in our little Beijing hutong—no hot water, no air conditioner or heater, no private bathroom, precious little to do. So, to entertain us, my aunt took my cousin and me out to the square every weekend. I still remember looking on, one of my small hands in my aunt’s, the other clutching a melting popsicle, as the crowds grew steadily larger, as the students erected a white Statue of Liberty model in the square, as their leaders shouted into megaphones and the crowds answered with fervor.

The last day we watched the students was the day the government cracked down on them.

I remember going out to the square on the day of the massacre. My older cousin was throwing a fit that day, wailing after my aunt refused to let him wear his favorite red overalls—red being a revolutionary color that could draw unwanted, dangerous attention. So, as he stayed home in his tantrum, I accompanied my aunt to the square.

It was a warm, sticky day in early June, and the square was packed with people. There were already tanks in the streets, sitting quietly for their next orders. Soldiers stood in lines against the protesters, staring each other down.

The tanks waited and the soldiers waited. The students waited. And we waited, not knowing what would happen next.

I remember my aunt leaning down to me. Whatever she sensed in the air that I couldn’t, it made her say, “Let’s go home early. This isn’t a good day to be here.”

For years afterward, I would hear two different versions. One, the version from China and from family members, was that the protesters were rabble-rousers the state was forced to stop in order to preserve order. Two, the version from the rest of the world, was that these unarmed college students were gunned down for daring to speak their minds.

Being a child, of course, I didn’t know what any of it meant. I didn’t understand why my parents taught me not to speak of it, or why they’d always say this in a hushed tone, as if someone could hear us. I didn’t grasp the era they had survived, the things they had seen. I didn’t understand why I stayed home from kindergarten the next day because school had been canceled all across Beijing.

But I knew what a tank was. The image of them in the streets, waiting, has always stayed with me.

To read Marie Lu’s complete article, check out the open access March/April issue of Literacy Today, ILA’s member magazine.

Marie Lu, the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling series The Young Elites and the blockbuster best-selling Legend series, will speak at the Closing General Session of the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits on Monday, July 17. For more information, visit ilaconference.org.

Before the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits kicks off on July 15 in Orlando, many attendees choose to warm up their brains at the interactive Preconference Institutes: focused, full-day sessions that unpack research, techniques, and strategies to apply in the classroom. If you will be in the Orlando area on July 14 and are looking to hone a new skill, check out the complete list of institutes and consider these seven perks:

• Intensive and immersive learning experiences: The 10 Preconference Institutes each concentrate on a hot topic in literacy, including equity in early literacy, supporting English learners, digital storytelling, accommodations for learning disabilities, and more. This offers you an opportunity to focus on a specific challenge or area of interest.
• Face-to-face connections: The intimate setting and extended time allows for more opportunities to form new professional relationships and strengthen existing ones. Preconference Institutes offer an ideal environment to exchange relevant ideas, insights, and experiences with literacy leaders from around the world.
• Lay the foundation: Preconference Institutes offer an in-depth look at topics explored at conference sessions and events. This provides the basis for a stronger conference learning experience.
• Interactive learning formats: Several of the institutes incorporate videos, discussion, paired exercises, digital demonstrations, and more.  
• Meet experts: You will have the opportunity to speak with and learn from respected literacy scholars and practitioners as they highlight critical insights from their research, present the practical applications of their findings, and lead breakout and informal discussions. 
• One-day registration: If you don’t have the time or resources to commit to the full ILA Conference & Exhibits, you can register for one all-day institute at a lower cost.  See conference registration for the complete range of prices.
• Get ramped-up: Former attendees have said that the Preconference Institutes jumpstart their learning and set the enthusiastic tone of the entire conference.

Register now and receive Standard rates through July 12.

Alina O’Donnell is the editor of Literacy Daily.