Every year, librarians and staff at The New York Public Library select noteworthy new kids books for readers and recommend them as their Best Books of the Year. Here are some of their recommendations for kids books in 2025. 1. Amina Banana and the Formula for Friendship by Shifa Saltagi Safadi; illustrated by Aaliya Jaleel. Amina is eager to make friends after moving to Indiana from Syria. She’s sure her formula will lead to success,…
Read More »Thousands of titles have been removed from public schools across the country this year. PEN America has documented nearly 23,000 banned books in public schools nationwide since 2021, a number never before seen in the life of any living American. This censorship is being mobilized by groups espousing conservative viewpoints and has spread to nearly every state. It predominantly targets books about race and racism or books featuring individuals of color and LGBTQ+ people and…
Read More »We live in a catch-up culture, where people feel perpetually behind and forced to hustle near the finish line after being waylaid by hurdle after hurdle. This contributes to the false belief that we can make up in intensity what we lack in good pacing, but we can’t cram kids’ way to reading. This advice on teaching reading comes from “Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six” by Maya Payne…
Read More »Reading is taught, not caught. This phrase has been in circulation for decades, but it bears repeating with each new generation of parents, and it has never been more fully supported by compelling evidence. Learning to read is a complex, unnatural, years-long odyssey, and parents should bear no illusions that their kids will pick it up merely by watching other people read or being surrounded by books. Parents are influential in helping kids navigate the…
Read More »Teaching phonics is one of the most effective ways to help children learn how to read. A key component of the Science of Reading, phonics instruction teaches children how to correlate sounds with letters or groups of letters, empowering them to decode and encode words. Phonics instruction is essential to helping students learn how to read and write; without this foundational reading skill, students will struggle to read with fluency and comprehension. Unfortunately, phonics instruction…
Read More »in ELA, Reading, Reading strategies, Teaching Your Child To Read
Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it, and some didn’t. Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Educators continue to debate how much to emphasize some ideas over others. Although the research on reading comprehension…
Read More »Ten years ago, Roy F. Smith, an English teacher at Round Rock High School in Texas, was inspired by the idea of putting a text under a microscope while reading “The Art of X-Ray Reading” by Roy Peter Clark. Smith, who has been teaching for 24 years, developed what he calls “spotlight reading,” a quick activity used at the start of class to get students to engage with written language without worrying about a grade.…
Read More »in Mathematics, News, Reading
America’s children have continued to lose ground on reading skills in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and have made little improvement in math, according to the latest results of an exam known as the nation’s report card. The findings are yet another setback for U.S. schools and reflect the myriad challenges that have upended education, from pandemic school closures to a youth mental health crisis and high rates of chronic absenteeism. The national exam…
Read More »in Reading
Looking back on 2024, young adult fiction readers saw many smart, thrilling, and fantastical books emerge. In this list, we have some of the most exciting reading available for teens and YA readers of all ages from the past year. Add these fast-paced, heartfelt, and fresh reads from our 2024 reading recap to your “to be read” pile. 1. Snowglobe by Soyoung Park. In Soyoung Park’s award-winning dystopian young adult novel, all is not what…
Read More »On a spring afternoon last year, students in Melissa Alter Smith’s class bustled around the room, filling 16 ounce plastic bottles with hot water, food dye, glitter and glue. “You can mix colors if you want. Just use one whatever you think represents the theme of your poem,” Smith instructed as students moved between stations. This was English, not art class, and the goal was not just to make a pretty, calming bottle. Each student…
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