8-8-2025

Late in 2024 I viewed two webinars focused on servicing patrons with dyslexia led by two dyslexia tutors and former public-school educators. Even after twenty plus years of teaching it was an eye opener. Or perhaps because of twenty plus years it was an eye opener.

Literacy instruction was a concern of ETCSD while I was there and a focus of district-wide inservice. Our local schools are not alone. From the webinars, I learned that only 37% of Wisconsin third-graders ranked as proficient or better at reading. Part of this can be attributed to undiagnosed dyslexia; however, it is also a result of corporate driven rather than research driven literacy instruction. The webinar only touched base on the background and recommended the podcast Sold a Story for the full details, which I later listened to.

The podcast help propel a nationwide look at literacy instruction and led to several states passing related legislation such as Wisconsin’s Act 20. Having observed elementary school teachers interact with emergent readers over the course of a decade, the ideas of using context clues and inferences to work out a new word were very familiar concepts. Act 20 eliminates those teaching techniques and instead focuses on breaking down the word and sounding it out, a technique that older generations will recognize. Sold a Story helped explain why the reversion.

A webinar about servicing readers with dyslexia spent a fair amount of time on these ideas because these techniques, which are helpful for them, turn out to be helpful for all readers.

As a result, we have created a section for emergent readers labeled Decodable/Phonics. The library’s collection already contained several series to assist with learning specific sounds made by vowels, letters and their combinations as well as phonics kits. We’ve added several new books that focus on specific sounds with few words per page or a short paragraph used for fluency.

The webinar also suggested a few educational games to reinforce those skills. The library has added three to our Library of Things. They include two card games whose rules are similar to Uno using letters instead. They are Mrs. Wordsmith’s Blah, Blah, Blah and Vocabularious. The first is recommended for beginning readers while the second is for 3^rd-5^th grade. The third game is Word on the Street Jr, a board game for seven and older that builds vocabulary and spelling skills. Game cards are color coded allowing one color to be more challenging than the other for growth.

Several items from the Library of Things, both the education and the recreational are on display at the library for easy access and awareness.  

Reading Now: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Listening to Now: A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire