Today, in a world of instantaneous communication, children and young people can be confronted with images and information that are troubling and hard to understand. “Fostering Hope with Children’s Literature” is an essay that draws on scholarship about how literature can give children and young people insight into how people have found unexpected sources of strength and resilience in challenging times.
In this presentation, Elfrieda H. (Freddy) Hiebert builds on her research on vocabulary and the article “Fostering Hope with Children’s Literature” (The Reading Teacher, 2022), in describing how literature for children and adolescents can create a community of hope in classrooms.
Freddy talks with the hosts of Literacy Talks about how small changes in teaching vocabulary and text complexity can lead to big differences in students’ literacy growth.
Download Literacy Research Association 2023 Conference presentations on Reading Research in the 21st Century.
Children need to see lots and lots of texts to become proficient beginning readers. To increase text exposure to engaging, curriculum-based texts, we are a new program at TextProject: TextProject’s (TP) Decoding + Knowledge Program. Our aim is to give teachers, tutors, caregivers, and others easy access to texts that they can use to support children’s automatic and meaningful beginning reading.
Join us in creating a list of benchmark books.
Freddy adds contemporary benchmark books to those already identified by Jeanne Chall and the CCSS.
We need to do more than simply get students back on track in their academic learning. Yes, getting back on the page as readers and writers is critical. But at the same time, we as educators need to recognize that children, just as adults, need to feel the vibrancy of community and a sense of hope.
Beginning readers have different levels of proficiency, but many may follow a similar path as they learn new words and orthographic patterns. This may not be the case for those with the lowest levels of ability, so curriculum and instruction should take into account the needs of those who depend most on their in-school literacy experiences.
Teachers can help beginning readers master more than half of the 2,500 most frequently occurring word families by focusing on words they have already acquired in oral language and words with high concreteness ratings.
