Archive for Early Childhood Literacy

Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt, Germany, to sing songs, build fires and roll in the mud. To relax, they kick back in a giant “sofa” made of tree stumps and twigs.

The birthplace of kindergarten is returning to its roots. While schools and parents elsewhere push young children to read, write, and surf the Internet earlier in order to prepare for an increasingly cutthroat global economy, some little Germans are taking a less traveled path—deep into the woods.

Germany has about 700 Waldkindergärten, or “forest kindergartens,” in which children spend their days outdoors year-round. Blackboards surrender to the Black Forest. Erasers give way to pine cones. Hall passes aren’t required, but bug repellent is a good idea. Read about their adventures in the woods in The Wall Street Journal online.

The advice is simple: Talk to your children as much as possible. It's a recommendation many parents might take for granted, but one that Boston educators are trying to spread to low-income families to give their youngsters a better shot at school.

Literacy coaches have begun fanning out among housing developments in the city, urging parents of infants and toddlers to embrace the unnatural role of a sportscaster. They should narrate a play-by-play of their actions, the coaches say, while bathing and dressing their little ones, riding the bus with them, preparing meals, and running errands—even if the babies respond with nothing more than a blink, smile, or coo.

The goal is to close the gap in achievement between low-income students and their middle-class peers, who generally are exposed to a much greater number of words at an early age. The more words young children hear, research has shown, the easier it will be for them to read and write as they grow. All that talk in the early years will bolster reading comprehension by the time the children reach the third grade, according to academic research. Read more in The Boston Globe online.

For 61 years, Toys for Tots has delivered Christmas presents to millions of needy children across the nation. Now, the Virginia-based charity is opening a new chapter in its mission with the launch of a year-round children’s literacy program. The national charity, run by the Marines, is expected to announce the Toys for Tots Literacy Program today, March 3, 2008. The group will collect books and deliver them to the country’s most disadvantaged children in an effort to break the cycle of poverty and youth illiteracy. Read more in The Washington Post online.

As kindergarten demands have increased over the last decade, more and more parents of children turning 5 in the spring and summer are faced with the question: to send or not to send.

Rachel Taylor and her husband, Brent, were faced with the question times three because all their boys had summer birthdays. They decided, especially because developmental research shows boys mature at a slower rate, it was best to wait one more year before starting kindergarten.

“I think it gave them a little extra time to mature before kindergarten,” Taylor said. “There's just so much they need to know, it just gives them that extra year to prepare.” Read about the decision many parents face in The Chillicothe Gazette online.

Since 1999-2000, the Institute for Social Research at the University of New Mexico has been following children who had attended a public preschool as they entered kindergarten and then moved on through Albuquerque Public Schools (APS). At the same time, APS changed from half-day to full-day kindergarten (FDK), introducing the full-day program gradually over a five-year period.

When researchers studied language and reading development for a group of children who started in 2002-2003, this group improved their reading skills considerably, moving up an average of 15 percentiles by the end of the year. The problem is that as these children proceed through the elementary grades their reading scores decline steadily. By third grade almost all the initial benefits of FDK disappear. Read more and find a link to the University of New Mexico study at The Mountain View Telegraph website.

In a growing number of classrooms around the country, 4 is the new 5 and preschool the new kindergarten. Hoping for a payoff of better schools and sharper students, states are aggressively expanding publicly funded programs to the youngest students—4 or even 3 years old. And turning away from play-oriented day care, states are setting new academic standards, including class sizes and teacher credentials, to provide higher quality education before the first day of kindergarten.

Led by states such as Florida, Maryland and North Carolina, enrollment in public pre-K by 4- and even 3-year-olds jumped 40% from 2001 to 2006. Excluding federal Head Start programs for poor children, the pre-K landscape now spans 38 states, including Delaware, and includes nearly 1 million children, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. Read more about the expansion of early child care services in The News Journal online.

Across the United States, educators, parents, and government officials are placing more emphasis on early childhood education to help preempt academic achievement problems later, according to an article by Karen Roebuck in the December 30, 2007, issue of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "If you build a love of learning at an early age, that love of learning will sustain them throughout school," said Don Owens, a spokeperson for the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Owens cited various studies indicating that children in high-quality early learning programs have higher rates of high school graduation and college attendance, lower dropout rates, earn higher incomes, and bear children four to five years later than their peers. For futher information, read the full article.

Early lessons in the arts provide a strong foundation for a future of learning--including literacy learning, according to a new book from the National Art Education Association (NAEA). The Impact of Early Art Experiences on Literacy Development, written by child development specialists Kathy Danko-McGhee and Ruslan Slutsky, offers thoughtful research and step-by-step art exercises that early childhood educators can use in the classroom.

"It is clear that a pedagogical shift must take place in our homes and schools if we are to meet the literacy needs of today's young learners," say the authors. For further information, visit the NAEA website.

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) praised the signing into law of legislation to reauthorize the Head Start program, saying it would help level the playing field for low-income students when they start school. “This makes an already good program better by making it more accountable, more financially solvent, and more focused on meeting the purpose for which it was intended—giving disadvantaged children an equal opportunity.“ Alexander said. He attended the White House ceremony Wednesday, December 12, 2007, at which President Bush signed the measure into law.

In February 2007, Alexander joined Senators Kennedy (D-MA), Enzi (R-WY) and Dodd (D-CT) in introducing legislation to reauthorize the Head Start program. Alexander was the author of a provision in the bill to establish 200 Centers of Excellence around the country to serve as model Head Start programs. This provision helped serve as the basis for a bipartisan compromise after years of debate in which members of Congress were unable to reach final agreement. Read more at The Chattanoogan.com.

Members of the Conservative party in England have set out plans which they say will ensure children can read by the age of six. Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove said English assessments for 6- and 7-year-olds should be replaced with a standard reading test. But primary school head teachers have warned against formal tests for young children saying exams could put them off reading “for a very long time.” Schools Secretary Ed Balls said the plans were “hastily cobbled together.” A key factor in the Tory plans involves extending the use of “synthetic phonics,” which focuses on teaching the sounds which make up words. Read the article at BBC News.

A central front in the Great Society’s War on Poverty when it was created in 1965, Head Start provides grants to public and private agencies to care for low-income children 5 and under. Over the years, some have questioned its effectiveness in preparing children for school and taken issue with its $6 billion annual budget. The program is fighting for federal funding as President Bush and Congress negotiate a spending bill for many domestic programs. Head Start was also reauthorized this week by Congress for the first time in almost a decade with measures to expand the program to more families. Read the article in The Chicago Tribune’s Web edition.

Congress on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, passed and sent to President Bush a five-year Head Start bill that opens the popular preschool program to more children while taking steps to see that it is well-run and its teachers are better qualified. Bush is expected to sign it, though he is unhappy with several aspects of the bill, particularly its lack of language allowing religious groups receiving Head Start grants to hire and fire staffers based on their religious affiliation. The House passed the bill 381-36. Hours later, the Senate approved it 95-0. Read the article at Ohio.com.

Childhood is full of truths and myths, some of them perpetuated by moms to get something done, but learning to read as soon as possible really can help students do better in English 101. Earlier this year, in an effort to enhance student performance, the Utah Legislature passed a plan that made optional extended-day kindergarten available to more schools. Many Title I schools, which receive additional funds based on the number of students receiving free and reduced-cost lunch, already had the program. The goal of extended-day kindergarten is to promote literacy and give students extra help so they will be better prepared for first grade. Read about Utah’s plan in The Daily Herald.

In January PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will launch a five-year literacy initiative for preschoolers and young learners aimed at teachers, parents, and caregivers. Funded in part through a grant from the United States Department of Education, the multi–pronged initiative, dubbed “PBS Kids Raising Readers,” will include a wide range of new tools and media, including television series, Web content, professional development, and a preschool curriculum, designed to develop literacy skills in kids aged 2 to 8. Read about the initiative in The Journal.

At the John Silber Early Learning Center in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where most students come from low–income homes with little or no English spoken, gaps in language and vocabulary pose the biggest instructional challenge. But thanks to a recently awarded three–year $1,738,087 Early Reading First federal grant, the center’s preschool reading and language–development programs are about to get a major upgrade, principal Jacqueline Bevere Maloney said. Maloney said she has already used the money to hire two literacy coaches, a language development teacher, and consultants from the Hanson Initiative for Language and Literacy, founded in 2000 by a communications disorders program in the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions. The $1.7 million will be spread over three years, she said. Read more in The Boston Globe.

Students at Indian Hills Elementary in Topeka, Kansas, will soon get help improving their reading skills from Sophie and Jules. Sophie is a golden retriever. Jules is a miniature schnauzer. Both are therapy dogs in the Reading Education Assistance Dog (R.E.A.D.) Program. The purpose of R.E.A.D. is to improve the reading skills of children using certified therapy teams as literacy mentors. In the program, dogs sit with children while the children read aloud. The dogs provide a calming, nurturing presence and serve as patient listeners to children who may be struggling to reach their reading potential. Read more at The Topeka Capital-Journal online.

Wayman Early Learning Academy sits across the street from the Eureka Garden Apartments, a subsidized, drug-plagued housing complex on the west side of Jacksonville. Many of Eureka's low-income youngsters attend the child care center on the grounds of the Wayman Chapel AME Church. It’s no wonder that when the bright blue, green and yellow backpacks of Mayor Peyton’s Book Club arrive, “it’s like Christmas time,” says Regina Lee, the center’s director. Stuffed with books, a hand puppet, reading blanket, flash cards, T-shirt and other items, the backpacks go to any 4-year-old in Jacksonville who wants one, rich or poor. In its fourth year, the program is beginning to be emulated in other cities as part of a growing effort to improve early literacy. Read about the successful program at usatoday.com.

Lawyers for Literacy, a nonprofit based in Tampa Bay, Florida, has signed up nearly 40 lawyers, judges, and law students as well as eight schools for this year’s Read to Succeed tutoring program. The program is dedicated to keeping kids in school and out of the juvenile system by helping third–graders with below–average reading skills prepare for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and pass the third grade. It is scheduled to run from Nov. 28, 2007, to March 5, 2008. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 85% of children and teens in the juvenile system have below–average reading and comprehension skills, indicating a direct correlation between illiteracy and crime. For more information, visit this website.

More than 30,000 pupils who attended schools in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan last year have been absent in 2007, the provincial department of education told IRIN News. About 102,700 students attended school in 2006. This year there are 70,000 students in 90 functioning schools in the province, an education official said. Though schooling started September 10 in southern Afghanistan, education facilities have remained closed in several districts in Helmand, which has been severely affected by the insurgency. For the past 15 months, gunmen associated with Taliban insurgents and other armed radical groups have torched more than 20 schools and killed 17 students, teachers and staff. Read about the turmoil in education in Afghanistan at IRIN News.

Working in quake–affected northern Pakistan, Nasrat Kazmi knows all too well the difficulties of teaching children in a tent. “It’s too hot in summer and too cold in winter,” the 35–year–old primary school teacher said outside the Sherwan primary school, perched on a knoll overlooking the majestic mountains of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. “It’s just not suitable for education purposes.” Two years after a 7.6 magnitude quake leveled her school in a disaster that killed more than 75,000 and rendered more than three million homeless, that is a reality she, along with her students, has no choice but to bear. Read about their plight at IRIN News.

  Only a few months after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi convened a “national summit on America’s children,” Congress has at least three different proposals on early-childhood education to consider. Since that May event, several lawmakers have been crafting legislation that would build upon the steady growth of prekindergarten programs that has already occurred in the states. In what pre-K supporters are calling a “trickle-up” effect, three federal plans have been offered that call for tying preschool education to the No Child Left Behind Act, which primarily focuses on K–12 schools. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Seven-year-old Assatou has been selling grilled plantains at a busy junction on the outskirts of the Liberian capital, Monrovia, for two years. “My family can't afford to send me to school,” she says with a sigh. “So I learned how to cook plantain instead.” Under a new education policy, parents or guardians of children like Assatou will soon face fines or even be arrested for allowing their children to sell in the streets during school hours. Parents say they would much rather put their children in school than to work, but they have no choice. “Children are not breadwinners,” said Hawa Gol Kotchi, deputy minister of education for information. “They should be in school, not working on the street.” Gol Kotchi said the move was part of a drive to meet a Millennium Development Goal to have all children enrolled in school by 2015.

Over six million children in the Arab world are currently not enrolled in primary education—one of the most fundamental rights of a child, according to Malak Zaalouk, UNICEF’s regional education adviser. The issue of primary education has come to the fore with the launch of Dubai Cares by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai. According to Unicef, of the more than 100 million children worldwide not in the primary education system, more than 55% are girls. “There are numerous economic and other reasons to make sure that children receive an education, but fundamentally it is a child’s right. It’s like breathing and eating—a basic right,“ Malak told Gulf News via telephone from Amman, also stressing the importance of providing quality education. Read the article at Gulfnews.com.

More than 300,000 students in immigrant-rich Northern Virginia started the school year yesterday. As the number of children in the region who speak a language other than English at home is increasing, so, too, is the number learning a second language at school. The expansion of foreign language programs came amid other changes. Every Prince William County elementary school has full-day kindergarten for the first time, and Fairfax is adding all-day kindergarten in 21 schools, enabling the school system to reach 70 percent of county schools with a program many educators think is critical for building early literacy. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

On the first day of school when presented with an alien room, a stand–in parent and 20 unfamiliar cohorts, 5–year–olds react, some “clinging to parents’ knees and others blowing off their parents with a quick ‘Okay, Mom, bye-eeeee,’ ” says Kelly Williamson, a primary school teacher in Calgary, Canada. “It’s pretty chaotic.” While the majority of children soon overcome any initial fear of their new playpals, between 10 and 15% never do. These are the preschoolers hampered by what researchers call extreme shyness, a condition to which psychologists believe some children may even be genetically predisposed. Read more at theglobeandmail.com.

To kick off National Literacy Month, preschoolers can step into a world where words truly are the stars of the show. “WordWorld,” which debuted September 3 on PBS KIDS(R) (check local listings), is a 3–D animated series funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education, which encourages 3– to 5–year–old children to become friends with words. “WordWorld’s” humorous storylines focus on age–appropriate social–emotional lessons while introducing preschoolers to key literacy–based skills, such as letter recognition and phonological awareness. Read the news release about the show at prnewswire.com.

Standards in basic math and reading among 7–year–olds in England showed no improvement this year while fewer reached the expected writing skills for the second year running. Although there are no government targets for 7–year–olds, the results call into question the improvements in primary schools ministers claim to have brought about by introducing policies such the literacy and numeracy hours. Boys lag behind girls in all subjects, including mathematics, although the gap is smaller than in reading and writing. Read the article at Guardian Unlimited.

No one wants to see a child struggle at reading. Parents can help a child avoid reading difficulties, or at least have fewer problems, by starting the reading and conversing in the home early. “I certainly would be always looking for opportunities to expose my youngster to new language and new ideas,” said Timothy Shanahan, immediate past president of the International Reading Association and a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “At age 1, it might be my child and I cooked together and we talked about the cooking words. At another age, we take them to a museum and we talk about the language of that science museum of whatever. It’s not enough to just put the youngster in those experiences. You’ve got to talk about it, use the language and help the youngster learn to use the words. The bigger their vocabulary, the easier to understand new text.” Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Bennett Shakoske of Turtle Creek was only in first grade, but he was already beginning to give up on school. He was having trouble reading. It was only when he moved to another district, repeated first grade and found a special-education teacher who used his love of Legos to motivate him that he was able to progress. Years ago, some advised waiting until third grade to get extra reading help to see whether the child would grow out of it. Now experts advise stepping in as soon as a reading problem occurs. “The research over the last 30 years really lays out very clearly you can’t start too early. I wouldn’t hesitate, if I were running a preschool, to try to address these kids’ needs,” said Dr. Timothy Shanahan, immediate past president of the International Reading Association and a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Every year at Sesame Street, producers gather before the start of the new season to gauge educational needs of their primary audience, toddlers. Starting today, as Sesame Street begins its 38th season on PBS, 26 new episodes will focus on early literacy and language skills. Read more about how literacy came to be chosen in this article from USA Today.

Educational DVDs and videos which claim to enhance the cognitive development of infants may hinder rather than help their language skills, according to a study published August 7, 2007 by the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute. The DVDs, widely available in stores, often claim to aid the development of babies’ speech and vocabulary, but parents have been warned that if they want to improve their infant’s ability to learn, they should limit the amount of time they spend using such products. The study highlights products such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby DVDs, and suggests overexposing children aged eight to 16 months to them may slow their ability to acquire a vocabulary. Read the article at scotsman.com.

Thirty years ago, Seqinbilig was a 12-year-old son of a herdsman living on the vast Xilingol Grassland in north Chinaa’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Every day, he looked forward to his “horseback teacher” coming to tell stories. “My teacher was a kind old man. He taught us how to read and write, and told us folk stories. He opened a window for us, a window to the outside world,” Seqinbilig recalled. Now, as the principal of a primary school in Xilinhot, capital of Xilingol Bund, Seqinbilig’s dream is to enroll many more herdsmen’s children in his urban school to give them better education than he received as a child. Read more here.

Education in Africa will come under the spotlight as education ministers from African Union countries meet for a five-day conference this week in Johannesburg, South Africa. Issues relating to the Second Decade of Education for Africa will be discussed at the Third Ordinary Session of the Conference of the Ministers of Education, set to begin Monday, August 6, 2007. The initiative was launched by the African Union in 2006 and is aimed at moving the continent closer to attaining the international target of primary education for all by 2015. Read about the conference at allAfrica.com.

Junie B. Jones is the hero of a popular Random House early reading series that has divided parents since it was introduced 15 years ago. With more than 43 million copies in print and a stage show touring the country, the series has its share of die-hard fans and is required summer reading at many elementary schools. But more than a few parents have taken issue with Junie B., as she is called. Their disagreement is a pint-size version of the lingering education battle between advocates of phonics, who believe children should be taught proper spelling and grammar from the outset, and those who favor whole language, a literacy method that accepts misspellings and other errors as long as children are engaged in reading and writing. Read more about the Junie B. debate in this article from The New York Times.

Most parents know that a good bedtime story can lull a child to sleep. And parents have long assumed that reading books with their child improves that child’s language skills and intellectual development. So it is surprising that, until recently, there was not much real proof of the widely held notion that joint book reading improves children’s communication skills. Now, a University of Kansas researcher has added to that evidence, showing that joint book reading is indeed associated with a child’s use of language and giving new details about how the variety of books and context of joint reading impacts linguistic development. Read more about this research in this article from the Kansas City infoZine website.

An innovative program designed to build early literacy skills among Latino children will continue to expand and assist more families, thanks to a US$1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation. The award was announced Monday (July 23) during a luncheon at the National Council of La Raza’s annual conference in Miami, Florida. The program, Lee y seras, is a national early literacy initiative designed to foster literacy development in children from birth to 8 years old. The program and its accompanying Web site www.leeyseras.net, provide research-based, culturally sensitive resources to help parents in their role as their child's first teacher. Read more here.

Angel LaBoy is not your average school administrator. The educator raps to Dr. Seuss’ ABCs and reggaetones about reading. Unabashedly, LaBoy flaps his arm like a chicken. The 46-year-old assistant principal wants students to keep reading throughout their summer break. Read more about LaBoy’s unorthodox techniques in this article from the Herald News of northern New Jersey.

A remarkable experiment in eradicating pupil illiteracy in West Dunbartonshire, a local authority in Scotland, has proved so successful that it is being held up as a model for education authorities across the world. In 1997, Tommy MacKay, the educational psychologist who pioneered the program, persuaded the West Dunbartonshire council to commit itself to eradicating pupil illiteracy in its schools within a decade. This year, it is on track to reach its target, becoming what is thought to be the first local authority in the world to do so. Read about its success using synthetic phonics at Guardian Unlimited.

The multilingual nature of South African society is used as an easy excuse for the fact that many primary school pupils have reading problems but it is masking the fact that reading skills are often poorly taught, according to Sarah Howie, director of Pretoria University's Centre for Evaluation and Assessment. South Africa participated last year in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement in almost 40 countries worldwide. "We don't have (academically) publishable evidence yet ... but from what we've seen the (pupils) do no better in their own language (than they do in English), and that's rather depressing," says Howie. Read more about the problems of multilingual classrooms at allAfrica.com.

An impartial commission should be created to examine the reasons behind the United Kingdom's very low social mobility, an education charity says. The Sutton Trust says the government's education policy has failed to give poorer children the chance to improve their quality of life. Trust founder Sir Peter Lampl said "It is a national issue which requires a national solution. We urgently need ... to examine why our record is so poor and how we can address this." The study found that children born in the 1950s had a better chance of escaping poverty than those born in 1970. The Sutton Trust says better provision of early years education is needed to prevent children falling behind by the age of three. Read the article at BBC News.

Class sizes in Scotland will be cut to 18 for four to seven-year-olds with an extra 550 new teachers and teacher trainees at a cost of £25 million this year, the Scottish education secretary announced June 20. During the next school year, 300 fully qualified teachers who do not yet have full-time posts for next term will be employed in pre-schools and primaries. An extra 250 teachers will also start training this year to go into schools from August 2008. Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish education secretary, said: "I am serious about cutting class sizes. A key policy of this government is to cut class sizes to 18 for four to seven-year-olds." Read the article at Guardian Unlimited.

When Drexter White II attended the MLK ChildCare Group Center in preschool, he had no idea that he would be returning only a few years later to do some teaching of his own. Drexter, 8, along with several other graduates, returned to the preschool Tuesday to lead students in a Juneteenth celebration. The graduates emphasized the importance of literacy by reading African-American poetry and stories to nearly 100 children ages 3–5. Read more of this article from The Dallas Morning News.

The popular children’s show Sesame Street will focus on literacy in its 38th season. The new season, featuring famous characters including Elmo, Big Bird and the show’s newest addition Abby Cadabby, will premier Aug. 13 and features a curriculum focusing more on early literacy and language skills. Read more of this article from the United Press International website.

Reading Is Fundamental, Inc. (RIF), a child literacy advocacy organization, has launched a Multicultural Literacy Campaign to promote and support early childhood literacy in African-American, Hispanic, and Native American communities. The multi-year campaign provides parents and caregivers of children under the age of 5 with new educational resources for building children's language skills: a new early childhood website, a new English and Spanish language DVD offering suggested activities to develop a child's language skills, literacy workshops for caregivers and parents, a public education campaign, and the donation of multicultural children's book collections to kindergarten classrooms in low-income communities throughout the United States. Visit the RIF website for more information.

Scottish 3-year-olds have a wider vocabulary and better understanding of colors, numbers and shapes than those elsewhere in the UK, a study has shown. Researchers from the University of London are tracking the development of more than 15,000 children. Examining vocabulary, they found that 3-year-olds in Scotland were three months ahead of their counterparts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The assessments were conducted on behalf of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, based at London University's Institute of Education. Professor Heather Joshi, the center's director, said further analysis would have to be carried out in order to establish why Scottish 3-year-olds were outperforming the rest of the United Kingdom. Read more here.

Four primary schools in England are giving families the choice of pupils starting lessons at different times of the day. In a government-funded experiment, pupils can start formal lessons at 7:45 a.m. or 11:00 a.m., instead of 9:00 a.m. The project is being piloted over a four-week period as part of the "extended schools" initiative. If it helps working families it could be used in other schools across the country. The children took tests before the trial and they will be tested again after the four weeks. Read the article at BBC News.

 A federal program designed to give preschoolers a boost in early reading received a mixed report card. The Early Reading First Program has had a positive effect on children’s print and letter knowledge, according to a report released by the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. But the study also found the program has had no impact on phonological awareness, which includes rhyming, or oral language, which includes vocabulary development. Read more of this article from CNN.com.

As part of England's drive to ensure that every child gets the best possible start in life, £9m will be targeted at disadvantaged areas to help parents get involved in their children’s early learning, according to a news release May 29 from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Proposals submitted include giving parents learning diaries and albums for their children (birth to 5 years old), and helping parents use music and singing to encourage their children to speak and listen. Other ideas include engaging fathers and grandfathers by recording them reading stories and organizing gardening activities. Read the release at Dfes online.

Softhearted people always advocate spending more on kids. But according to a new and authoritative synthesis of available evidence, there's a hardheaded case for investing more in young kids over older ones. Why doesn't all our spending on education buy better results? Nobel Prize winner James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Dimitriy Masterov of the University of Michigan argue that by waiting until kindergarten, we throw money at kids when it's too late. Their evidence urges shifting educational spending to younger children. Read more at Slate.com.

Nearly every kindergartner in Montgomery County knows how to read. That wasn’t the case just five years ago in Maryland’s largest school system or, literacy experts say, in most of the nation’s public schools. By pushing for all children to read before the start of first grade, Montgomery school leaders have embraced an emerging goal in public education. In essence, kindergarten has become the new first grade. Read more about the earlier literacy push in this article from The Washington Post.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is proposing a $10 billion federal program aimed at providing voluntary pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-old children in America. “Our educational system needs to be strengthened from start to finish, but we have to start where it all begins,” she said at an appearance May 21 at North Beach Elementary School in Miami Beach. Quality pre-kindergarten programs will more than pay for themselves because children will be less likely to enter special education programs, drop out of school, or enter the welfare system, Clinton said. She also said preparing children for school also reduces behavioral problems. Read the article at Jacksonville.com.

Parents of Hartford, Connecticut, schoolchildren in kindergarten through third grade will be notified later this month whether their children will be required to attend summer school. The city’s school system is making the summer classes mandatory for struggling readers. Under a new state law, school districts are required to offer summer classes to students who are substantially below grade level. Read more about the summer plans in this article from the Hartford Courant.

Portland Public Schools students, especially low-income ones, are spending more time with their heads buried in books, learning to read in kindergarten, deciphering math and cramming in still more with evening homework. Zeroing in on the basics has paid off: Low-income elementary students are doing better than ever. Who could argue with what it takes to make that happen? Parents, that’s who. Read more about the complaints that middle-income parents are making in this article from The Oregonian.

Pregnant teens in Albany are getting help to learn how to read to their babies. The expectant mothers receive books and are matched with College of Saint Rose students who provide literacy tips. Read more about the program in this article from the Times Union.

While some western Colorado elementary schools have reading programs that use a series of standard reading textbooks, schools such as Orchard Avenue and the New Emerson School use a textbook-free workshop model that allows students to choose their own grade-appropriate books from a classroom library and encourages them to engage in discussion about the books with their teachers and peers. Teachers says this approach is paying off. Results of the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests appear to support that claim. This year, 33 percent of Orchard Avenue’s third-graders were considered advanced readers. New Emerson’s third-graders ranked second in the district at 19 percent. In comparison, unofficial CSAP results for 11 of the district’s 25 elementary schools showed less than 5 percent of their third-graders were considered advanced readers. Read more of this article from The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction.

The National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) recently collaborated on a child and adolescent development project involving roundtables of knowledgeable researchers and teacher educators. They found that researchers in child/adolescent development lack mechanisms for disseminating new research findings and information to sources readily available to teachers, administrators, and other school personnel. Consequently, application of the research and knowledge base about child and adolescent development is a missing element in many teacher preparation programs. Read the full report at NCATE's website.

Toys and books had a major link to children’s development at the time, but the Institute of Education found no significant future associations. The most important factor, especially for mothers with little education, was playing with and talking to their children, said the London institute. The report’s lead author, Leslie Gutman, said toys and books in the home did have an impact on children’s physical coordination and social development. “It just doesn’t have an effect 12 months later,” she said. “To have parents read to their children is much more important than having a hundred books.” Read more at the BBC News website.

More than half of incoming kindergartners in Cincinnati Public Schools are behind in literacy readiness, but those who attended a district preschool are better prepared to succeed in school, according to findings of the third annual Ohio Department of Education’s Kindergarten Readiness Assessment—Literacy. Read more about the assessment in this article from The Cincinnati Enquirer.

On nights when she stays up to watch American Idol on television, Catherine Girard says she conks out right after the show ends. At other times, the 9-year-old Canadian girl lies in bed wide awake. "I don't like sleeping. I think it's boring," she said. Catherine is a fourth-grade student at St. Lambert Elementary in Quebec. Students say they've learned just how key sleep is after taking part in an educational pilot project by a research team from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. Reut Gruber says it's a well-known fact that sleep is connected to learning and memory. Read more in The Gazette.

South Africa's Minister of Education Naledi Pandor says parents should be actively involved in teaching their children to read. "We need to look at how we include parents in the learning processes," said Minister Pandor Monday at the unveiling of Readathon 2007. She said research shows that pupils who only read at school do not make the gains necessary for improving their performance in school. Pandor said her department had just completed an Early-Grade Reading Assessment program, which would be piloted in selected districts.
Read more here.

By replacing a magnetic C with a magnetic F, a first-grader at Ellington Elementary School in Oklahoma shows teacher Karen Harlow how she can make a whole new word. In another classroom, kindergartners tell reading teacher Judy Hall how Cocoa the Cat stopped killing birds. Officials with the Oklahoma Reading Association noted such teamwork by awarding Ellington with its 2007 Exemplary Reading Program Award. School officials will pick up the award May 13 at the International Reading Association’s annual convention in Toronto. Read more about this award-winning school in this article from The Muskogee Phoenix.

Kids have always read nonfiction at Prairie Norton Elementary in Ohio. But it’s never been quite like this. Students are reading magazines, news articles, short books and other nonfiction works with their lessons. On every visit to the library, they are required to pick up at least one nonfiction book. And those getting help with their reading have to choose a nonfiction book for extra practice. Read more about one district’s efforts to have its students ready for state achievement tests in this article from The Columbus Dispatch.

On a recent Friday afternoon the students in Sandra Palazolla’s cooking class baked pretzels and made old-fashioned root beer floats. But at Branciforte Middle School in Santa Cruz, there’s no such thing as a free snack. Before they started rolling dough, the kids had to write a short essay, and they got another writing assignment for homework. The next week, they were writing about the history of pretzels. Read more about this school’s effort to improve English scores in this article from the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The Kansas City School District had a choice. Stick with its old reading program in 15 of its struggling schools and get an almost-guaranteed $1.6 million federal grant. Or make a pitch for $3 million to expand its new reading program. The district gambled—and lost it all. Read more of this article from The Kansas City Star.

Columbus, Ohio’s public schools will replace 183 reading-intervention teachers next year with math and science specialists to try and bolster proficiency test scores in those subjects. Eliminating the so-called “safety-net” reading teachers, most of whom were placed in elementary schools to work with children reading below grade level, could have unintended negative effects on students’ proficiency in other areas, said Timothy Shanahan, president of the International Reading Association. Read more of this article from the Akron Beacon Journal.

In the midst of a high–density community in the Peel region of Ontario, Canada, residents struggle with poverty, unemployment, adjusting to life in a new country, and often a new language. Almost two-thirds of the youngest students at Bramalea’s St. John Fisher Elementary School were at risk for failing and didn’t meet basic literacy skills, struggling to identify letters, sounds and simple words. A drop–in program for children from birth to age 6 and their caregivers, with an experienced early childhood educator on site, is helping to turn things around. Read about the community hub center here.

Canada ranks “dead last” among developed nations in its spending on early childhood education—despite overwhelming evidence of how crucial the first six years of life are, says a new study by the country’s foremost expert in the field. One problem is the country–wide “chaotic mess” of programs and assistance that exists now, according to child development expert Fraser Mustard, one of the co–authors of the report, released earlier this week. Mustard proposes a system of community hubs, ideally located in schools, that would offer play–based preschool activities, help for parents, social service referrals and child care. Read the article at The Star.com.

The fact that the DIBELS test is used for different purposes in different schools points to a heated debate among testing experts about the validity of the test, which is given annually to about 2 million schoolchildren in the United States—sometimes as often as three times a semester. DIBELS has been championed as “scientifically valid” by Bush administration officials seeking to advance the teaching of reading through an emphasis on phonics. Kenneth S. Goodman, a past president of IRA, calls it “an absurd set of silly little one-minute tests that never get close to measuring what reading is really about—making sense of print.” Read more about the debate in this article from The Washington Post.

Alabama and North Carolina received the top score for the quality of their preschool programs in a report by the National Institute for Early Education Research. But in the same study, Alabama finished near the bottom of another list because only 1,080 4–year–olds are actually enrolled in state–funded pre-kindergarten. “We’ve got this great quality program, but we were dead last,” said Criss Hopson with the Montgomery-based Alabama School Readiness Alliance, which is lobbying the state to expand its preschool program. “For the children that are receiving the instruction, that’s great, but it’s not going to be enough to make a huge societal impact.“ Read more at al.com.

Congress is moving to end a standardized test backed by the Bush administration and given to hundreds of thousands of preschool children in Head Start programs every year since 2003. Early childhood experts complain that the exam is developmentally inappropriate and poorly designed. Bush administration officials say the test is necessary to help determine how well the nearly 2,700 Head Start programs in the country are progressing. Read the article at The Washington Post website.

A visit to Boston Medical Center’s pediatric clinic shows physical health and early literacy go hand-in-hand. “We know your body’s healthy, now let’s focus on your mind,” says Dr. Barry Zuckerman. “We learned a long time ago that many of our families did not have books in the home, and we just started giving them.” In 1989, Zuckerman started the Reach Out and Read program geared toward low-income children. At every visit, children from 6 months to 5 years old get a book from their doctor and parents learn how to make the most of them. Read more at msnbc.com.

Through the Family Literacy Program at Marquette University, 64 elementary school students from Milwaukee area schools come in to the Hartman Literacy and Learning Center at the university for 90 minutes a day, twice a week for 10 weeks, to get help with their reading. They are connected with 19 future teachers, who help the children as part of a practicum meant to prepare them for classroom careers. Read more about this program in this article from the Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee.

On the north bank of the Clyde, rows of grey, crumbling low-rise flats represent a part of Scotland scarred by poverty: West Dunbartonshire. In 1997, 28 per cent of children who graduated from West Dunbartonshire’s primary schools were functionally illiterate, and further studies confirmed that they were likely to leave secondary school in the same state. At that time, Tommy MacKay, a local child psychologist, set West Dunbartonshire a goal that many believed unachievable: to eradicate illiteracy by 2007. Over the past 10 years the region has individually assessed 60,000 pupils. In 2006, West Dunbartonshire recorded 96 per cent literacy, and is on track to achieve 100 per cent by the end of this school year. Read how this was accomplished in this article from The Independent.

At a school district in Washington, an initiative to strengthen students’ reading skills has lead teams of administrators to observe the classroom work of literacy coaches and teachers. Like athletes watching game film with their coaches to improve their performance, literacy coaches and teacher are improving their classroom performance through the feedback they receive. Read more about this approach in this article from The Seattle Times.

Children across South Australia will get a free reading pack starting March 3 in a program that aims to boost early childhood literacy. Premier Mike Rann launched the second Advertiser Little Big Book Club reading pack at the Port Adelaide Library. About 18,000 reading packs that feature The Only Me, by first-time South Australian author Meredith Harvey and illustrator Amanda Graham, and the It’s Rhyme Time DVD and book, will be distributed to children ages six to 12 months old. “It is the biggest early childhood reading initiative ever undertaken in this state,” Rann said. Read more at news.com.au.

A Twin Cities literacy program is showing lasting results for children at the highest risk of academic failure. The program—Words Work—is run in more than 40 Head Start classrooms in Ramsey and Dakota Counties, in Minnesota. Read more of this article from the Minnesota Public Radio website.

At Harmony Elementary School in Kentucky, students through third grade aren’t told that “throw” is spelled “t-h-r-o-w” and “snowball” is “s-n-o-w-b-a-l-l.” The school has thrown away its spelling tests and spelling books, and it’s not the only one. Within the past five years, four of the district’s nine elementary schools have ditched traditional spelling tests. Administrators say it’s a better approach to encourage writing than nagging children about misspelled words and teaching students to memorize words they soon forget. Read more of this article from The Courier-Journal of Louisville.

Principals and teachers around the country are growing increasingly concerned with what they call the fourth-grade slump. The malaise, which can strike children any time between the end of the second and the middle of fifth grade, is marked by a declining interest in reading and a gradual disengagement from school. Read more about the causes of the fourth-grade slump, and how to overcome it, in this article from Newsweek.

Goodbye, coloring book. Hello, data analysis, literacy and chromatic exercises. Where nap time and reading circles once sufficed, teachers now spend much of their days preparing their charges for their eventual encounters with standardized state achievement tests, which in Texas start in the third grade. Read more about how early education is changing in Texas in this article from the Houston Chronicle.

It seems impossible: Children who cannot read and are one-third of the way through learning the 26 letters of the alphabet are learning to write stories. Kindergartners in schools across Holyoke, Massachusetts, are learning to write far more than their name. They are writing short stories with a beginning, middle and end and comparing their experiences to those in a book. Read more about this writing program in this article from The Republican (Springfield, MA).

Schools in Allen County, Indiana, are partnering with their students’ parents in creating literacy programs that are improving reading levels. More than just reading aloud together, “Building Bridges With Books” promotes discussions of characters, themes, and other elements of the books. Read more about the program in this article from The News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne.

Voices Reading is one of several new programs that integrate literacy and social development in the early grades. They draw on accumulating research that finds close connections between early-reading success and emotional and behavioral development. Learn more in an Education Week article.

Beginning Jan. 1, every newborn in Jacksonville, Florida, will leave the hospital with a carry-all bag filled with goodies, including their first books about the city. The idea for baby Rally Jacksonville came from the family of Fran Peacock Coker, who authored the books for 4-year-olds. Coker died at the beginning of the year in Nova Scotia. Reading to infants is important in part because it teaches the child how to hold a book, flip the pages and identify colors, shapes and other objects, said Linda Lanier, who heads the Jacksonville Children's Commission. Read the article at the Florida Times-Union website.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will announce plans today to work together to improve education in developing countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The Seattle-based Gates Foundation announced a $40 million grant to the Hewlett Foundation, to which the Menlo Park, Calif., foundation will add $20 million. Both foundations are known for their work in education reform in the United States and for a variety of global development efforts overseas. Because a lot of work has already been done by other groups to boost children’s school attendance in Africa and South Asia, the Gates and Hewlett foundations plan to focus on improving the quality of education these children receive, millions of whom remain illiterate. Read the full article at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website.

The Department of Education has been strongly criticized over its attempts to improve literacy and numeracy standards in schools in Northern Ireland. Despite spending £40 million, a committee of members of Parliament said progress had been “manifestly unsatisfactory.” A quarter of all children in Northern Ireland leave primary school with poor ability to read, write and count, according to a report by the Public Accounts Committee. Betty Orr, headmistress of Edenbrook Primary in west Belfast, said she was not surprised at the findings. “(Illiteracy) can be second or third generation and we are well aware of it,” she said. “You cannot tackle this unless you have smaller classes, and more special needs help.” Read the article at the BBC website.

The Every Child a Reader program could offer a return of more than £17 in the next 31 years for every £1 spent now in the UK, a new study by KPMG, an accounting firm said. The study said pupils who left primary schools in England and Wales with poor reading skills could go on to cost between £1.7 billion and £2 billion a year. The research said there were costly problems linked to poor literacy, like truancy and poor employment prospects. The Every Child A Reader proposal puts specialist literacy teachers into schools to give intensive one-to-one support to 6-year-olds most in need. Research published in November showed children who had the extra lessons made an average gain of 21 months in reading age in four to five months of teaching. Read more at the BBC website.

Jefferson Elementary School in Belleville, Missouri is piloting its own version of a nationally acclaimed reading program called the Anna Plan, where books are tailored to individual reading levels. Students are divided into groups based on reading ability. One reading teacher works with each group of five or six children. The students choose their own books from a dozen or so selected for their level, from advanced first grade to fourth grade. The teacher hears all of the children read aloud for a few pages and takes copious notes on individual progress. Students are moved to different groups throughout the year if they improve or need more help. Read the entire article on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website.

Read a related article in The Reading Teacher.

In crowded schools, some with 80 children to a class, students in Mali are studying the Koran, the holy book of Islam. Called madrasas, the private schools in countries like Pakistan and other Muslim nations, have often been viewed with suspicion by the West, and even portrayed as academies for al-Qaeda. In this poor west African nation where 90 percent of people are Muslims and most adults cannot read or write, the growth of these private schools shows “a hunger for numeracy and literacy,” U.S. ambassador Terence McCulley said. But in some schools, children are forced to beg in the street for the schoolmasters and other children are vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and even human trafficking, according to a children's rights group. Read the article at the Independent Online website.

The Maryland Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics is expanding the Reach Out and Read program from Baltimore City throughout the state. The goal of the program is for pediatricians to provide age-appropriate books to children and parents during checkups from 6 months to 5 years of age, as well as train parents on early literacy guidelines. Read the article from the Cumberland Times-News (Cumberland, Maryland) website.

Early reading skills of a child are significantly linked to their later test scores regardless of a child’s socio-economic background, gender or mother tongue, according to a new study released Tuesday by Statistics Canada. It found that children who at age 8 or 9 were better at reading than their classmates showed significantly higher test scores in literacy a decade later. One of the study's authors said what was interesting and hopeful is that the literacy of a child was not dependent on his or her parent’s socio-economic background, education and mother tongue. For more information and links to the surveys, visit The Toronto Star website.

Recognition & Response is a systematic approach to addressing early learning difficulties before kindergarten. Developed and managed by the National Center for Learning Difficulties, the RecognitionandResponse.org website offers information and resources to help early educators address the needs of young children (3 to 5 year-olds) who show signs that they may not be learning in an expected manner, even before they begin kindergarten.

Ten percent of parents of UK primary school pupils never read to their children, according to a recent survey. Once their children start school, only one-third of parents read to them every day, and over a quarter of those surveyed admitted to skipping pages to speed up the bedtime story. Find details at the BBC News website.

UNESCO’s 2007 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, scheduled for release on October 26, commends Latin America and the Caribbean for expanding opportunities for early childhood education in their regions. However, the report also finds that despite its well-documented benefits on all aspects of child development and well-being, early childhood education remains the forgotten link in the education chain in most other developing nations. Learn more about the report at the UNESCO Media Services website.

Self-chosen activities, well-trained teachers, and less time in whole-group instruction help build stong language and thinking skills in preschoolers, according to the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.

Jumpstart’s Read for the Record, scheduled for Thursday, August 24, is intended to be the largest shared reading experience ever. Tens of thousands of adults and young children will read The Little Engine That Could together in their homes, libraries, parent groups, preschool centers, and major public venues on August 24 to show support for early learning, to engage in the very practice that helps young children thrive, and to set a world record.

A special edition of The Little Engine That Could, published by Penguin and generously printed gratis by Pearson, will celebrate Jumpstart’s Read for the Record campaign and share with you important tips for making the most of reading time with young children. The custom limited edition of The Little Engine That Could is available exclusively at Starbucks from August 1–28.

For more information or to sign up as a participant, go to the Read for the Record website.

A statewide program in Pennsylvania puts a special book in public places to promote reading to preschool children.

 An Early Reading First program seemed to help low-income preschoolers in Bessemer,