comicphonics for early readers

Why are boys’ reading scores declining? What can we do about it?

Posted on January 30, 2026 | Leave a comment

Boys are behind girls by three-quarters of a year by fourth grade. By eighth grade, boys are behind girls by a full year.*

For the past twenty years, the gap in reading scores between girl readers and boy readers has remained fairly consistent. Reading scores for both have declined steadily in the past ten years.

The result? Researchers theorize it has led to declining attendance by boys in both high school and college.

To make these conclusions, Stanford researchers analyzed state tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test.

What might be causing the gap between girls’ and boys’ reading scores and the decline in boys’ reading scores? Researchers theorize that these might be to blame:

The amount of time kids, especially boys, spend using electronic devices impacts students’ ability to focus.

The lack of time fathers spend reading influences boys to think reading is not important for boys.
The lack of early school intervention for boys who are struggling to learn to read makes change more difficult.
The defeatist attitude some boys develop when they realize they are behind their peers in reading ability makes them wonder, “Why bother?”
Stereotypes by adults who perceive boys as poorer readers than girls is picked up on by boys.
The demand by schools that students sit still and focus at earlier ages than in the past—tasks harder for boys than for girls–makes all learning harder for boys.

So given this problem, how can it be lessened or reversed? The same researchers have these ideas:

Identify students having trouble learning to read as early as possible in their schooling. Kindergarten is not too early.
Teach struggling readers in small groups of three or four students several times a week.
Teach what research shows works: Also teach spelling and handwriting. Teach using whole books with literary value.
Let boys see men reading.
Let boys have some control over their reading material.

*According to new research by researchers at the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.

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Posted in boys and reading, reading readiness.

5 point reading quiz

Posted on January 24, 2026 | Leave a comment

What percentage of fourth graders are proficient in reading*? Proficient means students can read fluently and understand what they read. They no longer need to decode words or ponder vocabulary words.
1. 30-31%
2. 49-50%
3. 63-65%
4. 82-83%
Students in the basic (lowest) reading group by fourth grade
1. are less likely to finish high school.
2. are more likely to be poor as adults.
3. are more likely to be jailed.
4. are more likely to remain basic readers the rest of their lives.
Research shows the best way to learn to read is
1. to memorize words based on how they look on a page.
2. to guess at new words in context.
3. to use phonics to sound out letters and syllables.
4. to use any one of these methods consistently.
Do US teacher prep programs still teach aspiring teachers that “balanced literacy” approaches rather than explicit, systematic phonics are the best ways to teach reading?
What approach does your child’s teacher use to teach reading?

And the answers are

30-31% of US fourth graders are proficient readers, a drop from 37% in 2017. Even more fourth graders–35-37%–are considered basic readers, meaning they cannot read at their grade level in school. So about a third of students are doing well, another third are getting by, and another third are behind.
All the answers are correct.
Research** shows that phonics-based reading is the best approach for young children.
Yes, about 40% of teacher prep programs do not teach a research-supported way to teach reading***.
If you don’t know, you can ask. As an advocate for your child’s successful future, you have a right to know if your child’s teachers are following the best practices based on research.

*According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

** According to the National Reading Panel, authorized by Congress in 2000 to study research on reading to learn what method of instruction works best.

***According to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

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Posted in methods of teaching reading

4 ways to improve reading comprehension

Posted on November 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

For years I have focused on the importance of a phonics-based reading curriculum for beginning readers. Research shows that young students exposed to sequential phonics instruction have better reading outcomes than students who learn primarily through other approaches.

But once students have learned the basic rules of phonics, and they are reading to learn new information, research shows other activities can help students comprehend better. Here are some.

Photos, drawings, sounds, videos and picture books can help students understand new-to-them concepts before they read about them. Providing students with rich background information can make acquiring new information easier. Students can fit new ideas into old ideas, or show how the new idea is the same or different from the old idea.

Venn diagrams are another way to do this. For example, to learn the relationship of math operations, students could see a Venn diagram like this:

The idea is to connect new information to information students already know. Stick figures showing two families’ with arrows from one person to another could show what nieces and nephews are.

Tables connecting what students know to what they don’t know can help. Here is how. Create a row of three sections. On the left, write a vocabulary word or concept students know. Leave the middle blank. On the right, write the new concept to be learned. Help students fill in the center by connecting the idea on the left to the new word on the right.

my birthday

important day in my life, hard to forget day, day I think about

milestone

What I’m doing at different times all day long

8 Pledge of Allegiance

8:15 reading class

9:15 snack

9:30 math class

schedule

We adults connect new concepts to what we know all the time. And, like students, if what we know is scant, we have a hard time learning the new concept. For example, I was reading a novel about a World War I soldier who was demobbed. What in the world is demobbed? I wondered. Attacked by a mob? Thrown out from a mob? I looked the word up, and found that demobbed means discharged from military service.

Okay, so how do I remember it? I know what a mob is, but in this case mob is short for mobilized, so that doesn’t help. I know what a mobile phone is though, so I pictured a soldier texting someone on his mobile phone to tell that he is discharged. Maybe he is throwing his hat in the air too. So connecting pictures to words and events is another method of comprehending.

Learning to read doesn’t stop with applying the rules of phonics. That is a vital start. Another vital aspect of reading is comprehension, a lifelong process.

The idea is to connect new information to information students already know. Stick figures showing two familie with arrows from one person to another could show what nieces and nephews are.

Tables connecting what students know to what they don’t know can help. Create a row of three sections. On the left, write a vocabulary word or concept students know. Leave the middle blank. On the right, write the new concept to be learned. Help students fill in the center by connecting the idea on the left to the new word on the right.

my birthday

important day in my life, hard to forget day, day I think about

milestone

What I’m doing at different times all day long

8 Pledge of Allegiance

8:15 reading class

9:15 snack

9:30 math class

schedule

We adults connect new concepts to what we know all the time. And if what we know is scant, we have a hard time learning the new concept. For example, I was reading a novel about a World War I soldier who was demobbed. What in the world is demobbed? I wondered. Attacked by a mob? Thrown out from a mob? I looked the word up, and demobbed means discharged from military service. Okay, so how do I remember it? I know what a mob is, but in this case mob is short for mobilized, so that doesn’t help. I know what a mobile phone is though, so I pictured a soldier texting on his mobile phone that he is discharged. Maybe he is throwing his hat in the air too.

Learning to read doesn’t stop with applying the rules of phonics. That is a vital start. Another vital aspect of reading is comprehension, a lifelong process.

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Posted in background knowledge, comprehension, diagrams, methods of teaching reading, phonics, picture books, reading comprehension

Having trouble reading? Average the number of words per sentence.

Posted on April 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

In preparing a third grade student last year for her end-of-year exams, I thought a certain passage might be a good fit for her reading level. The passage had been suggested as appropriate preparation for an end-of-year test for third graders in New York State. I gave it a go. The results were disastrous. Why?

The setting of the passage is a rural farm building and its surrounding snow-covered fields in 19th century Russia. My student lives in the suburbs of Atlanta in the 21st century. She has almost no experience with snow.

The main character is a hare. My student has no experience with rabbits or hares.

Certain ideas a 19^th century rural Russian child might be familiar with have no meaning for my student. “Threshing-floor,” “hoarfrost,” “open granary,” “lair,” and “peasants” are words from the story which baffled my student.

I decided this passage was inappropriate and decided to scrap using it. But recently I discovered that a teacher had done a reading analysis on that same text and found it was written at at sixth grade reading level.

A sixth-grade reading level test offered as a sample text for third graders preparing for their final exam. Hmm.

When I was in college, I was baffled while reading an assigned text. I read the first page five times, gaining almost no meaning from the words. I did a number of words per sentence analysis of the first page and discovered that the average number of words per sentence was 54. The author of the text might have known his subject matter, but he did not now how to write legibly.

Years ago Edward Fry created a graph for estimating the readability of a text. (It is produced below.) If you look closely, you will see that the number of sentences per 100 words is high for first graders, meaning young children will be able to read small sentences. When I was in 13^th grade, according to Fry, I should have been able to read 3.6 sentences per 100 words. That is about 3 and a half sentences of 28 words each, a big difference from almost two sentences of 54 words each.

As a comparison, the Bible in English has an average of 16.7 words per sentence. Books with a great deal of dialog usually have fewer words per sentence.

My point is that if your child is having a hard time reading a text, don’t immediately conclude that it must be your child’s fault. It could be the author’s.

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Posted in Fry Realability Graph, reading comprehension, reading research

If the US Dept. of Education goes, who will test and report on national student reading ability?

Posted on April 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

Every two years, Congressionally mandated tests in reading and math are given to fourth and eighth grade students.

Scores from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests show a continuing decline. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders—the largest percentage ever in the thirty-year history of the NAEP—scored below basic reading levels. Forty percent of fourth graders scored below basic reading levels, the largest percent in twenty years.

If President Trump succeeds in shutting down the US Education Department, the 2024 tests might become the last ones given. And if they are the last ones given, how will parents and educators know if their students are succeeding or continuing to lose ground? Consider:

Many states mandate reading and math tests each spring beginning in third grade. Yet those state tests are rarely as rigorous as the NAEP tests. A basic score on a state test might earn a student a below-basic score on the NAEP.

Many studies show students have increased their time watching TV, videos, and video games and using cellphones and social media. I was watching a rerun of an episode of Young Sheldon on which the father tells the high school son to read a book. The son glares at his father with a “You’ve got to be kidding” look, and then he tells the father, You read a book. The father realizes he doesn’t read any more than the son. Gotcha! the son’s eyes respond. And this show was supposed to be happening in 1992. Has anything changed?

Student absenteeism is higher than at pre-pandemic levels.

Colleges report on grade inflation by high school teachers. Students whose grades should prepare them for college courses sometimes need to take remedial courses before they can take freshman courses. Even then, these students sometimes drop out, realizing they are not prepared.

Several states have lowered or eliminated their graduation academic requirements. And states that still have them such as New York face increasing demands that the tests be eliminated.

Many universities eliminated the need for the SAT and the ACT. But some of them have changed their minds about that and have re-instituted the rigorous exams. Admissions people find those test scores allow them to compare apples to apples, as do AP exams.

Eliminating the NAEP is not the answer. Nor is hobbling the staff of the Institute of Education Sciences, which tabulates statistics on US education. Its staff was 175 at the start of the year and is now twenty.

Do you think your student is receiving an education which would allow him or her to score in the “proficient” range of the NAEP? How do you know? What do you compare your student’s work to? The grades of the student next door? Or a national exam?

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Posted in NAEP, US Department of Education

US reading scores decline. Again.

Posted on January 29, 2025 | Leave a comment

40 percent of fourth graders cannot read at a basic skills level.

One third of eighth graders cannot read at a basic skills level. For eighth graders this is the largest number of students ever to read so poorly.

These conclusions are the result of tests students took between January and March 2024. Test results show scores lower than prepandemic scores, meaning students have not made up the ground lost in 2020. In fact, the decline has continued.

These results were announced today, January 29, 2025, by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, which compiled state data and analyzed it.

These test results mean at least a third of US school children cannot routinely understand written text. They cannot explain why a character acts the way he does in a story.

The gap between higher- and lower-performing students has been a “persistent trend for about a decade,” according to the NAEP. The decline in lower-performing students’ scores accounts for most of the overall decline in scores. Higher performing students score about 100 points more than lower performing students. Until 2010 this gap was narrowing, but since then it has been widening.

Again: 40 percent of US fourth graders cannot read at a basic level. One-third of eighth graders cannot read at a basic level.

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Posted in literacy, reading comprehension, reading readiness., reading tests

New York students must learn phonics in 2025

Posted on December 10, 2024 | Leave a comment

Phonics must be taught to students in grades pre-K through third grade in all New York State (NYS) schools beginning in the fall of 2025.

Three children with signs around their necks that read: Meniruze words, Phonics, Whole Language

This emergency directive by the NYS Board of Regents requires all public school districts to review how reading is taught in their districts. It requires NYS districts to make necessary changes so that phonics is taught to pre-primary and primary grade students next September.

In particular, districts must teach six concepts associated with reading:

phonemic awareness (the ability to hear individual sounds in a word such as the sounds K A T in the word “cat”),
phonics (the ability to put together individual sounds to form words),
fluency (the ability to read words accurately, at a reasonable pace and with expression),
comprehension (the ability to understand what is read)
vocabulary (the ability to understand the meaning of words and to integrate new words into reading), and
oral language (the ability to listen and to speak).

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

This emergency action by the NYS Regents comes because almost a third of students cannot figure out new words by fourth grade. They have been taught to memorize sight words and high frequency words. But they have not been taught how to sound out new words. As a result, about a third of students can’t read fourth grade texts.

The NYS Regents is authorized by law to oversee all educational activities in NYS.

Nearly 25 years ago a federal study of research on reading showed that knowing phonemes and phonics is fundamental to learning to read. Yet many teacher training programs and district curricula do not focus on teaching phonemes and phonics. Last year the Regents encouraged school districts to teach phonics but resistance was strong. Now the Regents has mandated it.

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Posted in comprehension, fluency, oral language, phonemes, phonics, US education, vocabulary

Use wordless picture books to teach reading and writing

Posted on November 12, 2024 | Leave a comment

Wordless picture books are just what they seem to be—beautifully illustrated picture books without any words. Most tell stories with everything you’d expect from a story—a setting, characters, a plot, a crisis, and a resolution. Wordless picture books are a great way to teach reading and writing.

How can you use them to teach?

For a nonverbal toddler, show the pictures and ask the child to show what is happening by acting out the story. Let the child linger over the pictures to gain as much meaning as possible.

For a verbal preschooler who cannot write, show the pictures one at a time, and ask the child to tell you what is happening. To round out the child’s observations, ask questions about emotions shown, relationships of people and animals, and predictions of what will happen next. Ask if the story is scary or silly or serious.

For a child who can write a little, show the pictures and ask the child to write one sentence about each page. Focus on the content of the sentence. Encourage the child to figure out the main idea of a page and write about that. But remind about capital letters and punctuation.

For older elementary grade children, look at the pictures first. Discuss what happens at the beginning, middle and end. Ask about the setting (time and place), what problem needs to be solved, who is the main character/s, who or what opposes that character, and how the character overcomes the problem. Now ask the students to write an outline—not sentences, but words or phrases to remind the students what they want to include in the story. You might share a check list of elements to include. Now have them write the story.

For middle school students, show the story to them once for them to get the gist of it. Then ask the students to write (one word/phrase to a line) the following situations: exposition, inciting action, rising action, crisis, falling action, resolution. Review these words if students seem forgetful. Now show the pages of the book again, slowly, and ask the students to identify what happens in the book for each situation. When done, discuss the student choices and help students match the scenes in the book with the six situations. Now ask the students to write the story.

Where can you find wordless picture books? Search online or, if you have a children’s librarian at your school or public library, ask the librarian. Look for books with enticing illustrations that tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. Two of my favorites are The Fisherman and the Whale by Jessica Lanan and The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee.

You can also use wordless films. A favorite of mine is La Luna by Pixtar.

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Posted in reading tips, teaching tips, wordless books

New kindergarteners, new readers

Posted on August 29, 2024 | Leave a comment

It’s September, which means a new school year, which means a new set of kindergarteners learning to read.

Where to start? I have hundreds of blogs on this website showing how to teach reading. But in general,

Start with prereading skills. These include knowing how to hold a book, which cover is the front, reading from left to right and from up to down, and knowing that text means words.

Teach that letters are symbols of sounds, with each letter representing a different sound. Of course, some letters represent more than one sound, and some letter pairs represent a single sound, but that news can wait.

Help the child memorize several consonant/sound pairings and one vowel/sound pairing (usually the letter A). The child does not need to know every letter sound to start reading. Learn a few, and while you make words, learn a few more. And knowing ABC order is not important at all at this point.

Make sure the child realizes that joining letters together forms words. Create two- and three-letter words with the letters the child knows. I recommend using letter tiles, saying aloud the letter sounds and moving them closer together until they create words.

Help the child learn one-syllable, short-vowel words which follow the rules. “Golf,” yes. “Half,” no.

Help the child learn often used “sight” words necessary to form sentences. Lists are online.

Cover adding S for the plural; double F, L, S, and Z to make a single sound at the end of some words; CK to make the sound K; blends at the beginning of words; and blends at the ends of words. By now it’s winter break or maybe spring break depending on how often your child works on reading and how ready your child is.

Supplement what your child is learning with small early-reading booklets. You will find many publishers.

Review what the child has learned at each lesson. One way is to buy reading workbooks. The quality varies greatly. I recommend Explode the Code because it follows the pattern I have outlined above and because children like the silly drawings. (I have no connection to the publisher of that series.)

Keep reading to your child to instill a strong interest in reading.

Teach long-vowel, single-syllable words containing silent E and double vowels. Expect backsliding here from many children.

By now your child is more than ready for first grade. Check with your state education department’s standards for kindergarten to be sure you have covered everything. If you haven’t, or even if you have, keep at it over school breaks, including summer break.

And check back issues of my blog. If I haven’t covered a topic you are looking for, let me know and I will.

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Posted in ABC's, beginning readers, Explode the Code, letter sounds, letter tiles, methods of teaching reading, phonics, practice reading skills, prereading skills, reading in kindergarten, reading readiness., short vowels, silent "e" words

Ten questions to gain deeper understanding of a book

Posted on August 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

I write quizzes about books to help my students understand books better. Coming up with thought-provoking questions is a struggle. Too often I want to ask for a single fact, such as “Who is Peter’s little brother.” To help me devise more meaningful questions, I keep a list of question types. Here are questions you might use with your students.

What is the best summary of the book/chapter? I provide four options, keeping in mind that some students have trouble distinguishing between main ideas and details.

What is the best paraphrasing of a sentence or paragraph? I provide options which range from mostly restating information to truly putting the information into other words.

Why does the author ____? Repeat a word? Describe the weather so much? Not talk about negative feelings? Use a simile? These kinds of questions ask the student to consider the author’s style and the choices the author makes in writing a particular way.

How is this book/chapter structured? In chronological order? From most important to least important information? Stating a cause and its effects? Stating effects leading to a cause? From scary to scarier to scariest? Stating a conversation that becomes funnier and funnier? Many students read without realizing someone wrote what they read, and that someone made choices.

Does the writer like or approve of ____? We know right from the beginning that J.K. Rowling does not approve of Malfoy in the Harry Potter series. But how do we know that? What words tell us that? What actions? What facial expressions?

In what order do actions occur? List two or three actions, and ask what the next action is. Sequencing questions might force students to reread sections or to read more carefully the first time.

What is the tone of a chapter or conversation? What is the mood? I usually define tone and mood in the question to help the student.

What might a certain action foreshadow? A child falls while jumping rope. What might that fall foreshadow? Probably another, more serious fall.

What is an important fact in a chapter? Many children cannot distinguish between trivial facts and important facts. All facts seem important. Questions like this force students to rank facts.

What can you infer from the frown on a character’s face? Or from a character’s silence? Or from a character’s cowering?

From the picture book stage to the chapter book stage, these questions can be used to help a student grasp a deeper understanding of a book and the choices its author made to create it.