Literacy Now

For the past three years, I have served as an instructional coach at a Title I elementary school. One of my responsibilities is to help facilitate parent and community outreach, therefore I’m always on the lookout for new ways to strengthen the home–school connection and reading strategies and activities that parents can try at home.

In the past, I had used social media, brochures, and our Title I night as connection opportunities, but I still hadn’t seen the impact on student achievement or motivation that I had hoped for. Recognizing the importance literacy and a love of reading play in our students’ lives, I began to brainstorm how I could reach out to families every month, ensure the students have a quality home reading library, and partner with parents to provide reading opportunities at home. 

It was during this brainstorming session that I came across the Dollar General Literacy Foundation and applied for a Literacy Outreach Grant. The online application process was simple; there’s a multipage form consisting of open-ended questions about the project and general information. I submitted the application and we were fortunate to receive $2,000 to use for the 2016–2017 school year. I reapplied to receive additional funding for the 2017–2018 school year, and this year's grants will be announced in September. 

Thanks to the grant, our kindergarten through fifth-grade students receive a literacy take-home bag every month, which contains a new book and at-home resources (such as links to relevant websites and apps, discussion questions, main idea dice templates, and a reading version of Bingo). To date, we have been able to add more than 1,500 new books (which do not have to be returned) into the home libraries of our students. Studies have shown repeatedly that the simple act of providing resources and/or literacy activities positively impacts student literacy achievement. 

I purchased the books from Scholastic, which allowed us to maximize the amount and variety of books we could get with the grant funding. I made sure to have a balance of fiction and nonfiction titles, such as If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Ramona, Frindle, and The One and Only Ivan. 

Since starting the program in September 2016, we have seen an increase in student motivation to read, academic achievement, and parent involvement. I have had parents contact me to thank me for involving them in their child’s reading, and to share how great it is to see their child sit and enjoy reading. We have students who, in the past, would open a book and pretend to read, and some who would openly share that they had never read an entire chapter book. As a teacher and instructional coach, this stuck with me, and now when I come to deliver the take-home bags every month, it's these same students cheering and rushing over to get a bag. A day or two after the bags have been taken home, I have students come up to me and share what the book was about and ask if I know the title of the book they'll get next month. 

With additional grant funding, I plan to expand the Literacy Take-Home Bag program to include additional areas of literacy as well as include our preschool students and families.. I want to ensure every student has a solid, and early established, foundation of literacy, and this begins in the home. 

The Dollar General Literacy Foundation offers grants for summer, family, youth, and adult literacy programs. Funding ranges from $3,000 to $15,000, depending on the program. I encourage you to visit dollargeneral.com for more information and to apply for a grant to impact literacy in your school or community. 

Stephanie Laird is an ambassador and advocate for education, literacy, and teacher leadership. Currently, she is an instructional coach, a member of the Board of Directors of ILA, and president of the Iowa Reading Association. She shares her ideas with educators through social media, professional writings, and by facilitating adult learning nationwide. To connect with Laird, follow @LairdLearning on Twitter or visit LairdLearning.weebly.com. 

Every educator knows the reality of the summer slide. Once school is out, many students don’t continue with academic ventures during the summer months, and they return from summer vacation having forgotten some of the things they worked so hard to learn the previous year.

For reluctant readers, summer is a time when many forget about reading and writing. Some don’t even pick up a book because they are not motivated to read something that’s not assigned.

Parents and teachers may struggle to help students continue to learn over the summer. As a former Title I teacher, I have seen many students make great gains during the school year but return in the fall having lost a lot of progress.

On the other hand, there are students who look forward to summer because it affords them extra time to dive into the growing stack of books by their bedside.

One way to ensure that students have access to summer reading material is by participating in programs such as LitPick Student Book Reviews, which provides books to students in exchange for their honest reviews. The reviews are posted on LitPick’s website, and students receive valuable feedback on their writing.

Students have said that LitPick has helped improve their reading and writing, develop close reading and comprehension skills, and discover new genres that they enjoy.  

Here’s what a few students had to say:

• “Since joining LitPick, I can read much faster than I used to. I find that my imagination has expanded as well, which helps when writing.”
• “LitPick has helped my writing a lot. Writing is hard for me. I have been in the United States for about three years. In Nigeria, I learned and spoke British English, but I really learned a lot when I came here. I really like to read. Fantasy is my favorite type of book. I like to tell others about the books I read and hope my friends will like the same books. With LitPick, I can tell everyone about the books I read. I can work on my writing too. People say I have strong opinions. This is a good way to share them.”
• “LitPick has helped me grow as a reader by further developing my close reading skills and introducing me to new genres/writing styles. Through LitPick, I have read and enjoyed different genres of books that I wouldn't have picked up before. LitPick has helped me grow as a writer by causing me to pay more attention to what makes a book good or bad, which I can now apply to my own writing.”

Teachers and parents are always looking for ways to keep students reading without it feeling laborious or like an assignment. Both children and adolescents need breaks in order to be refreshed, but during the long summer months they also need to be engaged in activities that promote learning and exercise the skills they’ve worked so hard to acquire.

As a teacher, I have witnessed firsthand the relationship between choice and reading motivation. LitPick allows students to choose from a selection of available books. By providing students with choice as well as an outlet to share their thoughts, the program helps foster an authentic love of reading and demonstrates the power of words.

Most U.S. schools have a month before school starts up again—it’s not too late for students to polish their reading and writing skills in time for September. 

Tynea Lewis is a site administrator at LitPick Student Book Reviews. A graduate of Millersville University of Pennsylvania’s elementary education program (with an added certification in K–12 library science), Lewis is a former teacher and an ILA 2016 30 Under 30 honoree. 

When I want to relax after a long day of teaching, I often choose to watch a television show. With my “teacher eyes,” I frequently end up thinking about how the show flashing across my screen might relate to the content of an English language arts class.

For example, when watching an episode of Black-ish, I wonder how the show’s underlying commentary on race in America might help students understand a complex social issue related to an assigned text. I ask myself, How can this television show foster critical thought? What questions can I ask my students to help them develop their critical literacy skills?

As a teacher educator, I wonder how I can help current and future teachers address these questions in their own practice. 

In my experience as a high school English language arts teacher, my courses generally focused on one core text—a piece of fiction that I used as the foundation of a unit. However, I did my best to incorporate popular culture artifacts that were tied to central themes, conflicts, or ideas within the core text. I wanted my students to see the connections between their fictional text and the world in which we live. Moreover, I wanted students to grow into critical beings who questioned the world around them.

Teachers can integrate popular culture into their class curriculum as an avenue for students to explore themes from their assigned fictional readings. Increasingly, more popular culture artifacts address sociopolitical issues in a variety of mediums. For example, Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat offer rich storylines that openly address critical issues such as race, class, immigration, and gender.

Students’ understanding of sociopolitical issues can be deepened by connecting the issues to current events. Teachers can think of the core text as a starting place. Perhaps the teacher then connects a theme from the core text to a popular culture television show. However, students’ emerging understanding can be extended.

How can this be accomplished? The news is a good place to start. News events and political movements offer rich opportunities for students to critically examine dominant narratives in our society. Additionally, popular culture artifacts allow teachers to meet the needs of mandated initiatives that require nonfiction readings be included in class curriculum. Teachers can integrate nonfiction into their course by pairing texts with news articles that address themes and topics from a selected episode.

Popular cultural artifacts can bring complex issues to life. After all, the more perspectives students are offered, the more nuanced their understandings become. Consider the ways in which you might integrate popular culture artifacts with contemporary issues in your own courses.

Kathleen Colantonio-Yurko is currently an assistant professor of literacy at The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Kathleen Colantonio-Yurko will present multiple sessions including “All TV Shows Are Political?!: Fostering Critical Literacy Through Popular Culture in English Language Arts” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

In Taiwan, there is a great demand for effective strategies to teach English literacy skills. English textbooks used in elementary schools contain mostly short dialogues, and vocabulary and sentence exercises are usually controlled and graded linearly. These materials often don’t deliver meaningful, interesting, and effective literacy learning experiences.

In 2013, I worked with a group of elementary school English teachers to develop theme-based English reading and writing lessons to partially replace textbooks. Each theme consisted of children’s books of various genres, poetry, songs, or videos. We chose topics that were interesting and relevant to students’ lives, such as dentist visits, pet care, traveling, and cooking.

Reading materials were selected based on a few criteria: First, they had to be interesting and connect to students’ life experiences. Next, they had to be authentic materials that were not modified for the purpose of language teaching. Last, the language needed to be appropriate and not-too-challenging.

Writing is usually the aspect of language learning that second and foreign language learners find most frustrating. In our theme-based, meaning-focused teaching, we made sure that writing activities always came as a natural extension of reading activities. Students always wrote to express personal meaning. In the writing activities we designed, there was never a “correct answer.” Unlike writing activities recommended by textbooks, we never asked students to write copy or practice patterns. High achieving students were free to share what they wanted to say, and low achieving students practiced guided writing such as fill-in-the-blank prompts or sentence completion supported with word banks.

We were very curious about the effectiveness of this theme-based and meaning-based literacy teaching endeavor, so we conducted quasi-experimental research and invited another school of a similar size and parent socioeconomic status background in the same city to be the control group. Students from both schools received English reading and writing proficiency pre- and post-test. It was a delight to see that our students performed significantly better after receiving only one semester (four months) of this theme- and meaning-based literacy instruction. Interviews with students also revealed that they preferred the experimental instruction and wanted it to continue.

We put meaning and student interest at the forefront of what we chose and organized for students to read and to write. All educational and learning theories say that meaning and student motivation is important. What we learned is that while all English teaching theories and classroom research are important, the “meaning first” truth goes a long way. When meaning and student interests become the priority, everything else comes naturally in helping students to learn a new language.

Yueh-Nu Hung is an associate professor in the Department of English at the National Taichung University of Education in Taiwan. She is the director of the Center for Research on Elementary English Teaching, a project funded by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan that works on preservice and inservice elementary school English teacher training.

Yueh-Nu Hung will present a session titled “Finding Meaning in Literacy Learning: Classroom Strategies in Second and Foreign Language Literacy Instruction” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Getting students to read during the summer months can be a challenge. Our aim should not be to force them to read; it should be to develop their motivation to read. Voracious readers are almost always the highest performing achievers in school. Reading, like any other hobby, must be a year-round activity for optimal academic development and eventual career success. A number of strategies can be used to capitalize on students’ existing attitudes and interests and to promote summer reading:

• Read together: Whether first-grade or 12th-grade, stop telling and start sharing literary experiences. Don’t feel bound to the child’s reading level, as listening comprehension is typically much higher in early years.
• Encourage children to read what interests them—from comic books to blogs and even drama: While wide reading is the goal, no one likes to read everything. Check out ILA’s Choices Reading Lists for book recommendations for children by children.
• Consider their interests: For example, if the child is a sports enthusiast, suggest adventure, history, mystery, or other genres with an essence of action and competition.
• Read challenging books: Often, children can understand books above their comprehension level if the material relates to their prior knowledge or experiences. Besides, with help, what challenge can’t be met?
• Share your enthusiasm for reading: In general, we speak about what matters most to us. Talk to students about the books you read to inspire habitual reading (e.g., It was so inspirational to see how Chelsea left everything behind for a chance to perform on Broadway. I wish I had that confidence when I was 18 years old).
• Link technology to reading: Apps and websites offer freely available e-books, words of the day, historical significant events on this day, and visual dictionaries.
• Find an online community: More than eight million stories have been uploaded to FanFiction for reading, reviewing, and interacting with child and adolescent authors.
• Engage in the arts: Music, art, and drama bring what we read to life.
• Incentivize with learning opportunities: Read a book and go to a museum, read two books and go to a theatre production, and so on.
• Subscribe to freely available e-newsletters written for children/adolescents: (e.g., Teen Ink and Clover).

Evan Ortlieb is a professor and coordinator of the Online PhD in Literacy in the Department of Education Specialties at St. John’s University in New York City. He is an internationally recognized leader in the field of literacy education with previous work experience in Singapore and Australia and whose expertise centers on literacy empowerment, literacy teacher preparation, language diversity, and differentiated literacy instruction. He currently serves as president of the Specialized Literacy Professionals (SIG) of the International Literacy Association, and section editor of Unlocking Literacy Learning within the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. He also serves as president of the Ortlieb Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides college scholarships for cancer patients.