Why I Love Living in Virginia- from an Early Reading Perspective :)

The National Reading Council estimates that 1 in 5 children has difficult learning to read. Leading reading researchers (whose conclusions I meticulously memorized for my comps last year) have found that lack of achievement in the early grades is associated with a declining spiral of negative effects (Stanovich, 1986) and that most poor readers at the end of 1st grade are still poor readers at the end of 4th grade (Juel, 1988).

The importance of monitoring emerging literacy skills cannot be underestimated. Thankfully, my children live in a state where reading education is taken quite seriously! (That, or the McGuffey Reading Center at U.Va. has a couple of state delegates in its pocket!) 

Did you know that Virginia was the first state in the country to require universal literacy screening for early elementary students in kindergarten through third grade?

The Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening, or PALS for short, assists teachers and schools through screening, diagnosis, and progress monitoring. The screening identifies students who are not currently meeting minimal literacy competencies that require additional instruction in order to succeed. It provides explicit information about what literacy skills students know and which they need to learn. Finally, PALS shows student growth over time in specific literacy skill areas. Students are screened up to three times a year (depending on age and performance on previous PALS screenings) to monitor student progress over time. Teachers use the PALS data to plan additional intervention with respect to each child's instructional reading level, alphabet knowledge (letter recognition, letter-sound knowledge, and letter production), spelling/word study feature knowledge, and phonemic awareness.

Just one of the many reasons I love living in Virginia. When my children start coming with me to school, I know that the results of their screening will be used to develop a reading program individualized to their strengths and weaknesses as emergent or beginning readers. VA is for readers!