Geoffery Canada Webcast

As promised the Minnesota Meeting webcast of Geoffery Canada's address is available here. Canada is the President and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone.

Draft Literacy Bill Would Boost Funding for Older Students

By Mary Ann Zehr
Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org


A draft of a bill that some members of the U.S. Senate hope to introduce this summer would replace three federal reading programs, including Reading First, and authorize nearly a fivefold increase in the amount of money the federal government provides for literacy in grades 4-12.

The draft calls for providing funds for literacy programs along a continuum from birth to grade 12.

Meanwhile, several members of the U.S. House of Representatives are crafting a literacy bill that has components similar to the Senate measure, according to Lara Cottingham, a spokeswoman for Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., who expects to be a sponsor.

The Senate draft bill is “an opportunity to put the country on the right path for having a comprehensive literacy plan,” said Andres Henriquez, the program officer and manager of the adolescent-literacy project of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The philanthropy is a big funder of research in adolescent literacy and efforts by national organizations to support state and federal policy in that area. (Carnegie also underwrites coverage of new routes to colleges and careers in Education Week.)

Carnegie has been working for many years “to get adolescent literacy on the nation’s agenda,” said Mr. Henriquez, “and I believe it has arrived.”

Slicing the Funding Pie
The Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, a grantee of Carnegie, is among the groups that have pushed for an increased national focus on adolescent literacy. “We wanted to make sure through funding that the higher grades weren’t given the short shrift they have had in the past,” said Jamie P. Fasteau, the vice president for federal advocacy for the alliance, referring to discussions her organization has had with congressional aides.

The Senate proposal would authorize $2.4 billion annually for literacy for five years, with 10 percent of the money slated for pre-K programs, 35 percent for K-3 programs (the same grade span covered by Reading First), and half for literacy efforts in grades 4-12. An additional 5 percent would go to state activities, such as providing technical assistance. Currently, Washington provides $35 million for adolescent literacy through its Striving Readers program. If the draft bill were to become law, literacy efforts in grades 4-12 would get a huge boost in federal funds.

Senators on both sides of the aisle support authorization of funds along a continuum and funding for adolescent literacy, but they don’t agree on what proportion of the funds should be appropriated for efforts beyond grade 3.

“In the past, Congress has invested in early literacy on the assumption that it would take care of students’ needs,” said a Democratic Senate aide. “But research shows that is not the case.” She said the federal government needs to support literacy well beyond 3rd grade to ensure students can read well enough to absorb “high-level academic content.”

Members of Congress hope to have the House and Senate versions of the literacy bill match each other before they are introduced, the aide said. They might be introduced as stand-alone bills, but the intent is to make them part of the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, she said.

A GOP Senate aide said the draft bill gives grades 4-12 too large a share of the proposed funds. She suspects it won’t be fully funded at $2.4 billion, and said she is concerned that reading programs for students in K-3 could end up with even less funding than they received under Reading First, which she thinks would be a mistake.

“The allocation of the resources is a bit puzzling for us,” the aide said. “The earlier you can get proper literacy skills to these students, the better they are in the long run.”

Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who sponsored the Striving Readers legislation, are expected to introduce the literacy bill. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate education committee, is also expected to be a sponsor. On the House side, Rep. Polis is writing the bill with Rep. Todd R. Platts, R-Pa., and Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky.

Writing Included
The price tag of $2.4 billion would more than double the amount of funds that went to literacy each year while President George W. Bush was in office. Reading First, the flagship reading program during the Bush administration, received zero funds for 2009 and would get nothing in President Barack Obama’s proposed fiscal 2010 budget, but it was once funded at $1 billion per year. In fiscal 2009, Early Reading First for preschoolers is slated to receive $112 million and Striving Readers, $35 million.

The Obama administration is proposing that $370 million be spent on literacy in grades K-12 in fiscal 2010.

Aside from the emphasis on adolescent literacy, the Senate draft bill differs from current federal legislation in stressing writing as well as reading and for drawing attention to the needs of English-language learners.

But overall, reading experts observed, the draft bill borrows heavily from language in the No Child Left Behind Act that authorizes the reading programs currently in place: Early Reading First, Reading First, and Striving Readers.

Two reading researchers said they see a lot to like in the bill, but they also made recommendations for improvements.

Timothy Shanahan, a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he favors the boost in funding for grades 4-12 and for school literacy programs in general. “It should mean that more schools could participate, which is a good thing,” he said.

But he said the draft bill reflects some changes in wording from Reading First legislation that aren’t an improvement, because the new wording won’t be well understood by most teachers. The new wording requires K-3 programs to provide “strategic and explicit instruction using phonological awareness, phonic decoding, vocabulary, language structure, and meaning in context.” Mr. Shanahan pointed out that “language structure” and “meaning in context” replace the words “reading fluency” and “reading comprehension” in Reading First.

One of the Senate aides said the replacements were made to reflect the latest terminology that educators are using.

But Mr. Shanahan said the terminology in Reading First would be more familiar to and better understood by teachers.

Russell Gersten, the executive director of the Instructional Research Group, an educational research institute in Los Alamitos, Calif., said he, too, likes the bill’s emphasis on adolescent literacy, because “that’s where the heavy lifting needs to be, and there has not been much attention until recently.”

At the same time, he said he’s concerned that “the knowledge base is so thin in most of these areas, and we are scaling it up based on hopes, wishes, and theories.”

For example, Mr. Gersten said, educators are using some promising approaches to improve literacy in the middle grades, but “a lot of these ideas will not pan out.”

He said he’d like to see the bill require states to give priority to requests for funding in which evaluation is built into literacy programs. He said it should be focused on such key topics as building students’ academic language.

Currently, the bill calls for providing funds to recipients to collect and report data on students’ progress and participate in a five-year national study of literacy efforts.

No Personal Gains
Richard M. Long, the director of government relations for the International Reading Association, says his Newark, Del.-based group likes the bill’s emphasis on staff development and writing instruction.

Mariana Haynes, the director of research for the National Association of State Boards of Education, said she’s pleased the bill includes language intended to avoid conflicts of interest concerning districts’ selection of reading products.

The Reading First program became mired in controversy over allegations that consultants benefited from sales of certain commercial reading products that they promoted to states.

The draft literacy bill states that the U.S. secretary of education “shall ensure that members of the peer-review panel do not stand to benefit financially from grants awarded under this act.” It makes a similar statement about members of state literacy-leadership teams.

Jack Jennings, the president and chief executive officer of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, said any federal reading program is successful only if it influences how states and districts spend funds other than what is appropriated in literacy legislation.

“Lawmakers won’t be able to get enough money in a reading program to stand alone,” he said. “It has to be a program that influences a wider practice, professional development for teachers. It has to be a precipitator, a change agent.”

Vol. 28, Issue 35, Page 19

Copy and Paste Parent Tips

Copy and paste this info from the US Department of Education into your organization's publications for parents.

The Five Essential Components of Reading

Reading with children and helping them practice specific reading components can dramatically improve their ability to read. Scientific research shows that there are five essential components of reading that children must be taught in order to learn to read. Adults can help children learn to be good readers by systematically practicing these five components:

* Recognizing and using individual sounds to create words, or phonemic awareness. Children need to be taught to hear sounds in words and that words are made up of the smallest parts of sound, or phonemes.

* Understanding the relationships between written letters and spoken sounds, or phonics. Children need to be taught the sounds individual printed letters and groups of letters make. Knowing the relationships between letters and sounds helps children to recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and "decode" new words.

* Developing the ability to read a text accurately and quickly, or reading fluency. Children must learn to read words rapidly and accurately in order to understand what is read. When fluent readers read silently, they recognize words automatically. When fluent readers read aloud, they read effortlessly and with expression. Readers who are weak in fluency read slowly, word by word, focusing on decoding words instead of comprehending meaning.

* Learning the meaning and pronunciation of words, or vocabulary development. Children need to actively build and expand their knowledge of written and spoken words, what they mean and how they are used.

* Acquiring strategies to understand, remember and communicate what is read, or reading comprehension strategies. Children need to be taught comprehension strategies, or the steps good readers use to make sure they understand text. Students who are in control of their own reading comprehension become purposeful, active readers.

Another Good Blog

Early Ed Watch, a blog from the non-partisan New America Foundation.

Friday Fun

It's Friday, and Friday's are for fun.

Introduce your toddler or preschooler to science with a simple activity to show how plants take in water through osmosis.

You will need:
1. Glass
2. Water
3. Food coloring
4. Spoon
5. Stalk of celery with leaves still on the top
6. Knife
7. Cutting Board

What you do:

1. Fill your glass half full with water.
2. Add eight to ten drops of red food coloring to the water in the glass.
3. Use a spoon to stir the water and food coloring.
4. Put the stalk of celery in the glass. The leaves should be at the top!
5. Leave it alone for several hours or even overnight.
6. Come back and look at the celery.

What is happening?

Do you see little marks on the leaves? Take the celery out of the glass. On a cutting board, use a knife to cut a cross section of the celery stalk. With your child look at the celery stalk. You will see lines or what we sometimes call "strings" of the celery are the same color as the food coloring. On the outer edge of the stalk you will also see little colored dots.

We see evidence that water is absorbed or sucked up by a plant. It travels up the stalk and then into the leaves. This is how water is conducted and circulated in plants. Try this experiment with white carnations or Queen Anne's Lace.


Note: This experiment requires some leaves, since a plant's circulation is powered by "transpirational pull"—the leaves "breathing." You will also get better results if you cut the bottom of the stalk (or flower stem) to expose a fresh edge that has not become clogged or dried up.

Credits: reachoutmichigan.org and teaching-tiny-tots.com

Summer Brain Drain=Achievement Gap

It's called "the summer brain drain" because during those long, hot months away from school, kids supposedly forget a lot of what they had learned in class.

Research, however, tells a more nuanced story: Some learning is lost among some groups, and others gain.

Here's what experts from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Virginia and elsewhere say happens over the summer:

• Most students — regardless of family income or background — lose 2 to 2 1/2 months of the math computational skills that they learned during the school year.
• Students from low-income homes lose two to three months in reading skills learned in the previous school year.
• Middle-class students make slight gains in reading achievement as measured on standardized tests.

Those findings suggest the obvious: that children lose math ability when they don't use it and that middle-class students read more than those from poor families because they have more books at home. (The research looked at middle-class kids, but similar results would presumably be found in children from high-income families.)

Read more from the Washington Post's Valerie Strausshere.

Copy and Paste Parent Tips

Paste the Checklist for Parents of Kindergarteners into your organization's publication.

These skills usually develop when a child is in kindergarten. Talk with your child's teacher if you have questions.

_____ My child listens carefully to books read aloud.

_____ My child knows the shapes and names for the letter of the alphabet and writes many uppercase and lowercase letters on his own.

_____ My child knows that spoken words are made up of separate sounds.

_____ My child recognizes and makes rhymes, can tell when words begin with the same sounds, and can put together, or blend, spoken sounds.

_____ My child can sound out some letters.

_____ My child knows the order of letters in a written word stand for the order of sounds in a spoken word.

_____ My child knows some common words, such as a, the, I and you, on sight.

_____ My child knows how to h old a book, and follows printe from left to right and from top to bottom of a page when she is read to.

_____ My child asks and answers questions about stories and uses what she already knows to understand a story.

_____ My child knows that in most books the main message is in the print, not the pictures.

_____ My child predicts what will happen in a story and retells or acts out stories.

_____ My child knows the difference between "made up" fiction and "real" nonfiction books and the difference between stories and poems.

_____ My child uses what he knows about letters and sounds to write words.

_____ My child writes some letters and words as they are said to her and begins to spell some words correctly.

_____ My child writes his own first and last name, and the first names of some friends and family.

_____ My child plays with words and uses new words in her own speech.

_____ My child knows and uses words that are important to school work, such as the names for colors, shapes, and numbers.

_____ My child knows and uses words from daily life, such as street names and the names for community workers- teachers, mail carrier, etc.

Father's Day History in a Minute

The Minnesota Humanities Center, which brings us FRED (Fathers Reading Every Day) has produced a "Humanities in a Minute" video on the origins on Father's Day. Check it out here.

Copy and Paste parent tips will return tomorrow.

Everyone Poops

It's Friday, and Friday's are for fun.

Most parents look forward to potty training but it can be a surprisingly anxiety filled time for young children. Tao Gomi's
Everyone Poops is a fun book to help your child understand that all animals poop.

Older children will enjoy animal poop from a zoo keeper's and scientist's perspective. Check out the video "Who Pooped at the Minnesota Zoo?"





Check your animal knowledge by playing the game at WHOPOOPED.ORG and earn a Poop Expert certificate from the Minnesota Zoo.

Last Chance for Children First Events

June 22
Monday, 11am-1:30pm in Coleraine, Cotton Park & Beach on Trout Lake
Literacy at the Lake
The “Kayak Lady” will demonstrate kayaking. There will be games, water safety, reading stations and refreshments. Sign up for the summer reading programs with the Coleraine and Calumet Libraries.
Call Pat at 218-245-6232 or
Jo Anne at 218-245-2315 or
Melanie at 218-247-3108

June 27
Saturday, 10:30am-1:30pm in Grand Rapids,
Children’s Discovery Museum Petting Zoo
Pet animals like the potbellied pig, rabbits and even the Llama. Pony rides will be available. Treats will be served.
Call Eileen at 218-326-9333 or
218-259-9509

Copy and Paste Parent Tips

Copy and paste to use in your organization's publications.

Here's a handy checklist to see how you're doing with helping your child "get ready to read" during the ages of 2 and 3.

_____ I read with my child every day, even if it's only for a few minutes.

_____ I encourage my child to bring his favorite books to me so that we can read together.

_____ I point to pictures and name them out loud, and encourage my child to point to pictures while we read.

_____ I watch to see if my child sometimes makes eye contact with me when I read aloud. That tells me she is paying attention to me and the story.

_____ I talk with my child throughout the day about things we are doing and things that are happening around us.

_____ I try to be patient when my child wants to read the same book over and over again.

_____ I encourage my child to "play with books - pick them up, flip them from front to back, and turn the pages.

_____ Sometimes I listen when my child pretends to read a book - he holds the book, goes from page to page, and says words, even though tey're not the words on the page.

_____ I give my child paper and crayons so she can scribble, make pictures and pretend to write.

Friday Fun

When my son was little it was tough explaining that we needed to leave bird nests alone so the babies could hatch and mother and/or father bird could care for the little ones. He didn't see how "only watching" from six inches away was not leaving them alone.

Here's a link to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its NestCams. They always have highlight video on the home page so you are guaranteed to see something hatch. You can also check out the live streaming video of a variety of species, including Wood Ducks,
here.

Quotable

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
James Baldwin

When you read you give them something worth imitating!

Children First Event This Weekend

June 13
Saturday, 8am-1pm in Marcell, Clubhouse Campground
Kids Fishing Day
First, a water safety talk by the Itasca County Sheriff’s Department. Next, kids
get out fishing! Then, come back and enjoy some games and contests. Lunch is
provided, as well as prizes.
Call Jen at 218-246-2123

Copy and Past Parent Tips

Use these tips for parents in your organization's publications. (Adapted from Literacy Begins at Home by the National Institute for Literacy)

"Get Ready to Read" checklist for parents of preschoolers.

_____ I help my child hear and say the first sound in words (like "b" in boat) and notice when different words start with the same sound (like "boat" and "book").

_____ I help my child hear words that rhyme (like moose, goose, and caboose).

_____ I introduce new words to my child, like "bow" and "stern," which mean the front of a boat and the back of a boat.

_____ I talk with my child about the letters of the alhabet and notice them in books, like "c" for canoe.

_____ I point out signs and labels that have letters, like street signs and foods in the grocery store.

_____ I encourage my child to find the joy and fun in reading. Usually, I let my child choose the books we read.

_____ I let my child pretend to read parts of the book when we read together.

_____ I talk with my child about stories and make connections to things that happen in our own lives.

_____ I ask "what," "where," and "how" questions when I read with my child to help her follow along and understand the stories.

_____ I help my child write notes or make books (like an alphabet book) even if his writing only looks like scribbles or marks.

Books for Babies Grant Opportunity

Here's an American Library Association matching grant opportunity. Your organization does not have to be an ALA member. A $1,000 match is required for the $500 award.
Deadline October 1, 2009. Find out more here.

Friday Fun

It's Friday, and Friday's are for fun.

Are You My Mother?

Have Fun and Learn Something New at Children First Events

Saturday, June 6, 9am-Noon
in Squaw Lake, Round Lake
(where The Harbor Bar used to be)
Take a Kid Fishing Day
Learn basic boating and fishing safety, and how to properly fasten and use a Personal Flotation Device. Also, learn about appropriate bait disposal. Please call with number attending (for accurate lunch planning). Call Julie at 218-659-4239 or Brian at 218-659-4216

Sunday, June 7, 12-3pm
in Grand Rapids, Forest History Center
Trees – Homes for Birds
Build and install nesting boxes, platforms and feeding stations on the Forest History Center grounds. Learn about birds in our area, how to identify them and ways to attract them to your backyard. Make and take home your own birdhouse for your family.
Pre-registration required.
Register online www.getlearning.org or contact Karen at 218-327-5799

Monday through Thursday, June 8-11, 2:30-5:00pm
in Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids Area Library Community Room
Book Camp
Explore different methods of making books and create a new book each day. Each day of Book Camp is a separate event, so sign up for one day or all four.
Pre-registration required and limited to 20 campers per day (suitable for children ages 8-11). A snack is served each day.
Call Tracy or Darla at 218-327-8823

Saturday, June 13, 8am-1pm
in Marcell, Clubhouse Campground
Kids Fishing Day
First, a water safety talk by the Itasca County Sheriff’s Department. Next, kids get out fishing! Then, come back and enjoy some games and contests. Lunch is provided, as well as prizes.
Call Jen at 218-246-2123

Did you know?

Low reading skill and poor health are related.

Low literacy is common in the United States; in 2003 more than 14% adults scored in the lowest of five levels (level 1) on the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS); another 14% scored at level 2. These levels correspond to having trouble finding pieces of information or numbers in a lengthy text, integrating multiple pieces of information in a document, or finding two or more numbers in a chart and performing a calculation. Meeting the requirements of an ever-increasing percentage of jobs and the many demands of day-to-day life requires skill above these NALS levels.

A 2004 study sponsored by the United States Department of Health and Human Services found that low literacy impairs functioning in the health care environment, affects patient-physician communication, and inadvertently leads to substandard medical care. It is associated with poor understanding of written or spoken medical advice, adverse health outcomes, and negative effects on the health of the population.

Compare state and county estimates adult literacy at the NALS site. Read the full Literacy and Health Outcomes report at the National Library of Medicine web site.