It's so easy to get children to read more just by gifting subjects they enjoy. Read to them or with them to add even more fun. You can always find time to read. Children look to the adults in their life when it comes to reading. If they see how much you enjoy it, it won't be long before they want to sit with their own book.
This is a no brainer!
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What an amazing world Mr. Bankston has created. He writes in great detail. If you close your eyes, you can almost see the planets. I wasn't sure I'd like this book, it seemed to be over my head at first glance. I started reading and became so engrossed in the story I lost track of time. Mr. Bankston's writing gently tugs you along. He has given us a romance, a war and an archeologists dig. You must read this book.
I found no issues.
I gave this one 5 cheers out of 5 because the world in this book is so refreshing.
The beginning of this book is very original. I don't think I've ever read a book where the brother is showing his true self so openly. I found it does have some heartbreaking places throughout. Ms. Barlow brings with her a strong will to make this book come alive. The characters are detailed and allow us to see the good and the bad. Amora's brother even shows his black heart. The pace of the book is very smooth. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
I found no issues here.
I gave this one 5 cheers out of 5 because the subject matter can be botched but Ms. Barlow handled it very well.
Set in the 1970's, we get to meet many of the people who live and work on this street. I found the story so wonderful. The writing is stupendous! Ms. Janis sets out the characters almost like a lineup. I felt like I was in the moment with this one. I could seemingly hear the noises of offices and such. This is another one for October. The book will escort you through the areas Sarah examines.
I found no issues here.
I gave this one 5 cheers out of 5.
This story is perfect for October. Mr. Herold does an amazing job of telling every characters individual story. He weaves the plot in such a way that will make you wonder if you missed some details. There is a little of everything in this book. Psychics, ghost hunters and investigators all have a place in the story. I was enthralled with this book. Can't wait to see what's next for Mr. Herold.
I did find one issues, well it's more like a suggestion. I think Nigel's story should have been explained a bit earlier.
I gave this one 5 cheers out of 5 because it's a wee bit spooky.
Mr. Overbeck topped himself with this book. Well written with three dimensional characters you'll recognize. Cruel Lessons is intriguing and heartbreaking. It's a story taken straight from society today. I enjoy the slowing building of the story because just when you think you've got it all worked out, another piece drops in your lap. You chose get this one for your TBR pile.
I didn't find any issues.
I gave this one 5 cheers out of 5 because when Mr. Overbeck writes, it's as though he know intimate details of the readers life.
Hello Friends and Followers,
I just wanted to let everyone know what's happening. I am still having issues with my sight. This time it's something new plus the old issues. I'd give you the names of the issues if I could remember them. I'm reading when I can and I post as I'm able. Some off you know I've had trouble with Amazon and Mr. Jeff Bezos. He's trying to make me pay $50 before I post any reviews. It's illegal to make people pay to post reviews. My lawyer is the one who let me in on that. So I am doing my best to get Mr. Bezos to take that off my account so I can post my reviews. I do have about 50 reviews to post but remember I post them in 30 places and that takes time.
I am doing my best to keep things going. Talk to you soon!
Melanie
A knockout is the word I'd use for this book. The story will touch your heart. Mr. Heldt really lets his characters to shine through. You will recognize these characters in your own family. It's the first time I can agree whole heartedly with the author. Get this and make Mr. Heldt an auto buy.
I found no issues.
I gave this one 5cheers out of 5.
WOW! I have to tell you, this series is one of the VERY best. It's easy to get caught up in the story. Kate Oliver has the ability to draw the reader in, one page at a time. The characters are so real they leap off the page. I felt as if I were sitting in the same room with this couple. You may balk at the subject matter but I implore you to step out of your comfort zone and read this series,
I didn't find any issues. This book does have adult themes and some triggers. You can't go wrong with this one.Try it anyway.
I gave this one 5 cheers out of 5.
I wanted to let you know how things are going with my eyesight. On Monday, I had shots in both eyes. At the time, Dr. Gordon told me things look about the same. To me it means no new swelling or bleeders. It means things have just slowed down. Yes, they hurt. Yes, I'm frustrated. Yes, I'm still reading and posting reviews when I can.
I appreciate all of you so much. I thank you for hanging in there.
I am limited on the amount of time I can read . Still, I do read.
Thank you again for stopping by,
Melanie/Kissablysweet1
This book is fantastic. It really challenges the romantic relationship. Shea and Trevor are great together, but can they get the forever they want. Love and fear are included in equal measures. This book will take you on a journey where your heart will be in your throat at times, and then your heart will swell with the love. You're gonna be glad you got this.
I didn't find any issues.
I gave this one 5 cheers out of 5 and can't wait to read more of this author's work.
At an elementary school in Hutchinson, Minnesota, a veteran
teacher is crusading for reform, haunted by the fear that, for 28 years, she failed children because she was not trained in the cognitive science behind reading.
And Ohio may become the latest state to overhaul reading instruction, under a plan by Gov. Mike DeWine.
“The evidence is clear,” DeWine said. “The verdict is in.”
A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country.
The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.
Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.
The movement has drawn support across economic, racial and political lines. Its champions include parents of children with dyslexia; civil rights activists with the NAACP; lawmakers from both sides of the aisle; and everyday teachers and principals.
Together, they are getting results.
Ohio, California and Georgia are the latest states to push for reform, adding to almost 20 states that have made moves in the past two years. Under pressure, school districts are scrapping their old reading programs. Even holdouts like New York City, where hundreds of elementary schools were loyal to a popular but heavily criticized reading curriculum, are making changes.
About 1 in 3 children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, according to a key national exam. The outcomes are particularly troubling for Black and Native American children, nearly half of whom score “below basic” by eighth grade.
“The kids can’t read — nobody wants to just say that,” said Kareem Weaver, an activist with the NAACP in Oakland, California, who has framed literacy as a civil rights issue and stars in a new documentary, “The Right to Read.”
Science of reading advocates say the reason is simple: Many children are not being correctly taught.
A popular method of teaching, known as “balanced literacy,” has focused less on phonics and more on developing a love of books and ensuring students understand the meaning of stories. At times, it has included dubious strategies, like guiding children to guess words from pictures.
The push for reform picked up in 2019, when national reading scores showed significant improvement in just two places: Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Both had required more phonics.
But what might have remained a niche education issue was supercharged by a storm of events: a pandemic that mobilized parents; COVID-19 relief money that gave school districts flexibility to change; a fresh spotlight on racial disparities after the murder of George Floyd; and a hit education podcast with a passionate following.
“There is this urgency around the story, this unbelievable grief,” said Emily Hanford, a journalist at American Public Media. Her podcast, “Sold a Story,” detailed how stars of the literacy world and their publisher diverged from scientific research. It racked up nearly 5 million downloads.
The movement has not been universally popular. School districts in Connecticut and teachers unions in Ohio, for example, pushed back against what they see as heavy-handed interference in their classrooms.
Even within the movement, there are quiet rumblings of worry. There is no established curriculum for the science of reading — it refers to a large body of research that must be woven into the craft of teaching.
Can such a sprawling and enthusiastic movement stick to the science — across thousands of schools and classrooms? Can real change be executed and sustained?
“I saw this post where somebody said, ‘Reading wars are over, science of reading won,’” said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin.
“I’m sure it will be on a T-shirt soon,” he said. “But actually, nobody has won until we’ve actually seen we’ve improved literacy outcomes — especially with kids in groups where there is a long history of being left behind.”
A ‘Perfect Storm’
It all feels a bit familiar to Susan Neuman, an education official under former President George W. Bush.
In 2000, at the behest of Congress, a National Reading Panel recommended many strategies being argued for today. And the Bush administration prioritized phonics. Yet that effort faltered because of politics and bureaucratic snafus.
Neuman, now a professor at New York University, is among those who question whether this moment can be different. “I worry,” she said, “that it’s deja vu all over again.”
Today’s movement, though, is less top down, and far more dynamic.
“You had this perfect storm happening,” said Jennie McGahee, a mother in Hudson, Ohio, who watched her son James muddle through reading and writing in elementary school.
A former teacher, McGahee tried to help at home. But she came to believe a central problem was the curriculum: a popular program by Lucy Calkins of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Until recently, the curriculum had put less emphasis on phonics and more emphasis on children reading and writing independently.
During pandemic Zoom lessons, McGahee said, other parents in her affluent, mostly white suburb known for its schools also began to question why their children were not getting more explicit instruction.
Then last fall, “Sold a Story” scrutinized the work of Calkins and others, giving ammunition to parents like McGahee. She emailed the podcast to her school board, and at a recent meeting, marched up to the microphone.
“This will end with our curriculum changing — it’s just a matter of how long we need to fight to get this done,” said McGahee, whose son, now 12, still finds reading taxing. The district said it was piloting another program to boost phonics.
Calkins rewrote her early literacy curriculum last year to include, for the first time, daily, structured phonics to be used with the whole class. In a statement, she said she had always treated phonics as critical. But she added: “To reduce the teaching of reading to phonics instruction and nothing more is to misunderstand what reading is, and what learning is.”
For many communities, the urgency of literacy is not new.
“These arguments have been made for a long time by a lot of people,” said Sujatha Hampton, the education chair for the NAACP in Fairfax County, Virginia.
But amid calls for racial justice after Floyd’s murder, Hampton saw an opportunity to address gaps in reading outcomes for Black and Hispanic students, compared with white and Asian students in her district.
She pressed for structured literacy in 2021 — and saw swift change.
“I told them, ‘If you don’t switch this, I’m going to make sure that every time anybody Googles your name, what’s going to come up is your statistics and the racial discrepancy in how kids are learning to read here,” Hampton recalled.
Science of reading advocates say they are gaining momentum, in part because their battles have converged.
“We had no traction when we were dyslexia moms,” said Amy Traynor, who co-founded a parent group that recently won a curriculum change in Katy, Texas, a Houston suburb. “When we abandoned the use of dyslexia and started talking literacy for all children, that’s when progress started to be made.”
Avoiding Pitfalls
At Panther Valley Elementary, a rural, low-income school in eastern Pennsylvania, the science of reading has been transformative, said the principal, Robert Palazzo.
His school had been using a reading program by influential educators Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, whose work has been questioned by science of reading advocates. The district even took out a loan to afford the curriculum, which cost around $100,000, he said.
But teachers complained: It wasn’t working. Just one-quarter of third graders were meeting benchmarks.
“I had to swallow my pride and realize that selecting that was a mistake,” Palazzo said.
Fountas and Pinnell pointed to research supporting their program and said “countless schools” had achieved positive results. Their approach, they said, includes phonics.
Panther Valley, though, used grants, donations and COVID relief money to buy a new phonics curriculum. The school also recently added 40 minutes of targeted, small-group phonics at the end of every day.
Nearly 60% of third graders are now proficient in decoding words, up from about 30% at the beginning of the school year, progress Palazzo hopes will translate to state tests this spring.
Still, experts foresee a number of pitfalls to meaningful reform on a national scale.
For starters, bringing reading science to commercial curricula is still a work in progress. Schools may scrap their old textbooks but find there is no perfect replacement.
“What’s coming along is in the right ballpark at least,” said Seidenberg, of the University of Wisconsin. But he warned against treating anything as “gospel.”
There is also the danger of overemphasizing phonics. To establish true literacy, students need to be able to not only sound out words, but also read quickly and build enough vocabulary and background knowledge for comprehension.
Another risk: impatience.
When Mississippi improved reading scores in 2019, it was touted as a “miracle.” In fact, progress came over many years, with systemic reform that included sending literacy coaches to the state’s lowest-performing schools.
“I don’t want the science of reading to be the shiny object — ‘look here, look here,’” said Jack Silva, the chief academic officer in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, an early adopter of the science of reading. “You forget the hard work that it takes to implement.”
In his district, principals were trained first, then teachers, grade by grade. Eight years later, training is now underway for middle and high school principals, an area that Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago, says deserves more attention.
Literacy for early readers is not an “inoculation,” Shanahan said.
Students must keep building skills — moving from “The Snowy Day” to Steinbeck and Shakespeare.
In Columbus, Ohio, Joy Palmer is still fighting for her daughter Dey’Leana, 18.
Dey’Leana struggled with reading from an early age. Her mother blames, in part, an ineffective reading intervention Dey’Leana received during elementary school. Even after Dey’Leana was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 9, her mother said, she did not get all the support she needed.
The Columbus district, as it moves toward the science of reading, is no longer using that early intervention program, and said it was working closely with Palmer and her daughter.
School has not been easy for Dey’Leana. By middle and high school, she stopped raising her hand, pushed back at teachers and at times skipped class.
“I would be stressed,” Dey’Leana said.
Now a junior, she is nowhere close to reading on grade level, her mother said.
“What are they going to do now that we are in the repercussion and damage stage?” said Palmer, who is pushing for the district to provide Orton Gillingham tutoring, a highly structured approach for struggling readers.
Even if executed flawlessly, the science of reading movement cannot solve everything. Poverty plays its own damaging role in students’ lives. And some children may always need specialized instruction.
Cathy Kucera is determined to try.
Fueled by regret for what she did not know in her first 28 years as an elementary schoolteacher, she and a colleague, Heather Vaillancourt, are on a two-woman crusade at their school in Hutchinson. They begged for a phonics-based curriculum and even wrote their own kindergarten lessons, incorporating research they say they were never taught.
“If it means we aren’t making friends or we aren’t the most popular people on campus, we don’t care,” Kucera said. “It’s about kids learning to read, and I’m not wasting another day.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
I am having issues with my eyes. My doctor told me in another 5 months I could
lose my eyesight. She is working along side of me to correct this issue. I have to
really watch what I do right now. I haven't stopped reviewing. I am very limit on
when I can do anything. If I over tire, my memory suffers. I'm working on the
books a little at a time. Yes it is taking longer than I like. I ask for your prayers
and patience.
This book is a wonderful read for children. Yes, it's a teaching moment. Henrietta isn't sure about herself. She's learning though. There were several of her new friends telling her they'd help her hide her quills.
I didn't find any issues.
I gave this one 4 cheers out of 5 because it's a fantastic book.
LANSING — The Michigan Senate voted Wednesday to dismantle a controversial law requiring students to repeat the third grade if they’re behind in reading skills.
In a 22-16 vote, senators moved to repeal requirement that third graders who’ve fallen a year or more behind on state standards for reading comprehension be held back instead of advancing to fourth grade.
The “read or flunk” provision approved as part of a 2016 law signed by former Gov. Rick Snyder aimed at assisting struggling readers and improving accountability in schools.
Related:
Democrats and education advocates have long argued the retention requirement should get tossed, pointing to studies claiming doing so hurt students psychologically, disproportionately impacted low-income and minority students and simply doesn’t work.
Repealing the provision was named a top priority by legislative Democrats after they won majorities in both legislative chambers last fall.
Senate Bill 12, does away with the retention policy, but keeps provisions outlining how schools assess students for reading skills and what interventions to provide. The bill requires the state to notify parents if their students have a reading deficiency that qualifies for state intervention in the fourth grade.
“It’s ineffective and out of touch education policy like this that led me to run for office,” said Sen. Dayna Polehanki, D-Livonia, a former teacher. “This bill will ensure our kids have the reading supports they need—and eliminate the punitive and problematic mandatory retention piece they don’t.”
Most Republicans voted against the measure, except Sens. Ruth Johnson, R-Holly, and Joe Bellino, R-Monroe.
Sen. John Damoose, R-Harbor Springs, argued that nixing the retention portion of the law is unwise, especially as students struggle to recover from learning loss after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Now is not the time to weaken standards and accountability or to take tools out of our toolbox,” Damoose said.
The third-grade reading law was passed in 2016, but the retention component did not go into effect until students took standardized assessments in the 2020-2021 school year. That means the first group of students that were retained were in fall 2021.
The law allowed several exceptions, including whether they’d previously been held back or if the parent and superintendent agreed retention wasn’t in the child’s best interest.
Michigan State University researchers found that of the nearly 5,700 students eligible for retention this fall, only 545 students were held back. Researchers also found that Black students and those from low-income families are more than twice as likely to be held back compared to their white and higher-income peers.
The report found 13.6 percent of the Black students who were flagged were held back, while 5.7 percent of white students flagged repeated third grade. Similarly, 10.5 percent of eligible students from low-income families were held back, compared with 4.3 percent of students who are not from low-income families.
Both Democrats and Republicans have endorsed investing more heavily in reading tutors to help struggling students catch up by third grade.
Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, said Tuesday he believed the passage of the initial third-grade reading law “was a real miscarriage of the legislative process” and usurped the work being done at the local level to intervene when kids were struggling with reading.
He urged lawmakers to “just scrap the whole thing” with a full repeal instead of prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to school districts with varying needs.
I saw something today that upset me. One of my very favorite people is a dumpster diver named Cathie. Despite her health and her Mother's, whom she cares for, she saves items to donate. Fifteen hours ago she was doing just that when she decided to check out a CVS. After a bit of digging, she found several boxes of paperbacks. Brad Taylor, Jude Deveraux, Jennifer Ryan, Danielle Steel, Laura Griffin, Lee Tobin McClain, Stephen King, Clive Cussler, Brenda Novak, J.A. Jance, Allison Brennan, Stacey Abrams, Candace Camp, Lorraine Heath, Mary Kubica, Megan Hampton, Debbie Macomber, Robyn Carr, Lori Foster, etc. These books look like brand new. Covers were in place and they were in clean boxes.
I was very sick to my stomach when I saw this. How can CVS just box up these books? Why didn't THEY donate them? I presume they are paid for. Still aren't they supposed to remove the cover if they throw them away?
Amendment II
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