Children's Literacy Round-Up: Newspapers, Dyslexia, and Funding for Literacy Programs

Here is some recent children's literacy and reading news.

• I don't have a link for you, but I did get an email back from Congressman Mike Honda expressing his support for Reading is Fundamental. He said, among other things: "I fully support the goals of the RIF program and will work with my colleagues on the Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee to restore this essential program." And he must have been hearing from other people about this, because he had his letter pretty detailed.
• Tricia links to, and provides excerpts of, several recent news stories about reading at The Miss Rumphius Effect. I especially liked this quote, from an OpEd piece by Timothy Egan: "Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product."
• Anastasia Suen sent me the link to this Reading Rockets post, which in turn links to a primer on dyslexia, published by the Florida Center for Reading Research. The report talks about identifying students with dyslexia, effective instruction methods, preventing reading difficulties for students with dyslexia, and other topics. 
• According to a Herald article by Andrew Denholm, a "literacy project which helps secondary school children in one of the most deprived communities in Britain is to be axed." The article continues: "Since 2000, the £80,000-a-year initiative in Glasgow has given intensive support to pupils with a reading age of four or more years under their chronological age. But now that funding, which pays for two dedicated literacy teachers to help some 30 children a year at Drumchapel High School improve their reading skills, is to be cut off." Kind of like cutting off funding for RIF, isn't it?
• According to the Jamaica Information Service, "The Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, ... (recently) launched the 'Reading the Bottomline' project, at the St. Michael's Primary School in Kingston. This initiative seeks to increase the literacy level of students at the primary school level."
• The Herald Bulletin (IN) has an article by Brandi Watters about a children's literacy program that uses newspapers. The papers are used to "foster logic in sequencing", to illustrate the "six basic principles of news reporting", and to help teach the differences between fact and fiction.

And that's all for this week. Happy reading!