Increasingly, parents and teachers are embracing the controversial Science of Reading (SoR), pushing for State policies that reinforce more phonics instruction. It’s troubling to see they only discuss commercial decoding programs, of which there are many. They rarely mention the importance of picture books and giving children the chance to read freely. Is phonics important? […]
Kindergarten Reading Push: Still Problematic During the Pandemic
Parents and educators, convinced that kindergartners must learn to read, might purchase unproven commercial online reading programs during the pandemic. The best solution for kindergartners currently is for school librarians and teachers to get interesting picture books and reading material into the hands of young children. Standardized testing made pushing children to read in kindergarten […]
How NCLB is Still Destroying Reading for Children
NCLB was a bi-partisan bill signed into law in 2002 during the Bush administration’s push for school reform. We now recognize how punitive the bill was, its troubling use of one-size-fits-all standardized testing to demonize and close public schools, the punitive AYP and “highly qualified” teacher credentialing changes, the unrealistic predictions that all children would […]
Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?
Yes. Mother Goose can fly alone! She doesn’t need any help from dialogic reading, which is like close reading for preschool. This formulaic reading exercise was created by Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst an experimental psychologist who is director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Here is more about Dr. Whitehurst. […]
The POWER of Picture Books v. High-Stakes Testing & Common Core
In 2010, I read an article in The New York Times that both saddened and infuriated me. In “Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children” by Julie Bosman we learned about a bookstore in Brookline, MA, a beautiful community surrounded by Harvard, MIT, Tufts, etc., where parents were rejecting picture books. They skipped buying […]