About 50 years ago, the educator Lucy Calkins pioneered a technique called balanced literacy, which de-emphasized the use of phonics to teach reading. It was widely adopted in the United States, including in New York, the country’s largest public school system.
But doubts about the approach persisted, and now it seems that using balanced literacy has given a generation of American students the wrong tools.
Dana Goldstein, who covers family policy and demographics for The Times, discusses the story of balanced literacy and how Professor Calkins is trying to fix the problems that the technique created.
Guest: Dana Goldstein, a national correspondent for The New York Times who writes about family policy and demographics.
Background reading:
- Lucy Calkins has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics. Critics may not be appeased.
- Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for “the science of reading.” Can they get results?
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
From new york times, I'm likable borrow. This is a daily. The new york city department of education says in two thousand and nineteen, only fifty three percent of third grade students were proficient in reading. That rate fell to forty nine percent in two thousand and twenty two
That is why the city says it announced plans today to dramatically changed the way children are taught to read. A few weeks ago, the nations largest public school system, new york city, abandoned its current system for teaching kids. How do we does not just in the up is all costs
Eighty percent of the kids in chicago do not read on worry lump in detroit
ninety one percent
We don't worry, love
the latest and biggest acknowledgement to date that agenda
Sure of american students has been given the wrong tools to achieve.
I see this is a national problem and is the educational crisis of Acta. Today, my colleague David Goldstein on the influential educator who helped create those flawed talks and is now trying to fix the problems that they created it's tuesday june sixth Dana. Concerning my conquer morning, I can see that you have brought some books and I think we're gonna need them. So thank you for doing that. We're here to talk about how kids learn to read in the united states and so to begin with. I think it would be useful for you to define and demonstrated
The big schools of thought that exists in america, education about the best way to teach kids to read. So if your daughter's yeah smile, probably the dominant way over the past few decades, has been a school of thought, called balanced literacy and balance. Literacy really focuses on wedding. Children choose those books that they gravitate towards giving them a lot of time to read quietly by themselves. Having channel
and sort of really focus on the meaning of stories. What happens in them?
and really look a lot at. The pictures even use the pictures to get the words on the page. Ok, let's demonstrate balanced literacy through this delightful looking book in front of us. Yes, this is a book called mixing colors. My five year old daughter brought it home from
her classroom, which has a balance literacy library in it an let's go, had an open book. It has a big splotch of red paint, a big splotch of yellow paint, and then it shows them mixing together to form or
and what, if I can read it, it says red and yellow make orange yes and there's a few things. I would just call your attention to another page. First of all, you can kind of gas what the words.
be by the collar collars right. I mean five year old, six year olds and can a garden. They know their colours already, and so they very little even need to look at the words to get ya. Think materials that was a red, yellow
yet the other thing I would point out, as while the concepts of the colors are very easy. The words themselves are really hurt.
The gardener, yellow is all really hard word rhythm, irregular pronunciations, and
always orange. Ok, the second love it. Yes, this book is part of a site. That's based on something called the signs of reading and heavily focuses on facts. The signs of reading and fond acts are ways that teach children to read
a really sequenced introduction to the sounds and letter combinations that make up the english language, so we wouldn't be introducing,
word yellow, for example, before we do tat, dog and other very simple words like that to just what those confidence and thus do exactly what gets or opening up this book at book is called pham, and the purpose of this book as well
notice is really to teach that the latter, a in many cases, says, ah so page one says pham and cats, so it has three different.
This is a saying in three different words: sam and cat, and not just one more page, Matt and
Yeah right, there's no way. I would know that that fellow is mad cause he's not a splotch of red paint.
yeah. You would not know that his name was mad. If you can read the book to summarize balanced literacy,
focuses more on stories, context, illustrations its
learning to read a word by concern
bring the meaning of the story and what word might fit into the themes in the images on the page. By contrast, science of reading includes a big dose of foreign x, which is to say a kid learns. The letters sounds a constance fowls. The common combinations that we talked about like
car for cat and therefore is going to sound out the words rather than try to rely on contextual clues. You got it and the two schools of thought represented by these two bucks balance. Literacy on one hand and the signs of reading on the other have been battling it out in this country for decades as to which is the best method, the right method. For,
in young children, how to read and read and of courses. The most fundamental skill of all schooling reading is the first thing. Kids need to do when they get to school and what's happening right now is a big
important reckoning over which of these methods is right and which is wrong, and how did we get to this
overdue moment of reckoning. Let's start in the nineteen sixty is,
the time there was really no settled way to teach children how to read, but in the late nineteenth sixties, early nineteen, seventy is something with her
in education and the coward culture, and it was this idea that all learning should be based on the child's curiosity that children could sorted
naturally, figure it out on their own. If, given the right environment and one person in particular, really and bodies that school of thought and came to be a real leader,
in the united states with this idea and her name is lucy calkins.
Should we know about lucy, goggins, LISA, corkins gear up outside buffalo,
she was one of nine children and although her parents were doctors, they also maintained a working farm and they put the kids to work on the farms as a bit of an eccentric family or idyllic
running on your eyes, she said she worked really hard and she learned how much a child can really do, because her in her siblings were expected to care for these animals
and she always was really interested in teaching secondment of asking some biographical money just goes out alaska to those lan line. Are you got started?
over the course of my reporting, I had the opportunity to interview professor hawkins and speak to her about how she got started in tee
king and hush came to develop her ideas about how children learn. I wanted to be a good teacher. I thought with with fervour, but I I didn't know what I was doing and I needed to
Furthermore, and in the early nineteenth seventies, she decided to go apprentice herself in the elementary school.
in england, and the reason she wanted to do. That is because they were known as being at the forefront at that time of progressive child centred education. The idea that children
Curiosity could really drive learning that teachers were guides to develop kids' curiosity, not that teachers had all the answers or the adult was the real leader of the classroom for the opposite of the teacher, with a stick at the front, saying like look at the chalkboard, and this is what we're doing exactly and that's exactly what lucy calkins wanted to get away from, and so I flew to heathrow and hitchhiked stuck out. My thumb and I like to
richer. So she goes over to the uk and she's an oxfordshire, and she absolutely falls in love with the type of teaching that she sees in those alimentary schools. So the teaching was a cut of a simple pilot, structured kind of really workshop, so that the teacher could be responsive. Kids were deeply engaged in projects. There was an emphasis on craftsmanship and care and like for example,
hold me about watching children just arrayed in front of a mushroom pseudo? They would have the kids very painstakingly observed the mushroom and try to draw it married accuracy and in a careful, invested, deep work and they spend an hour just looking at the door,
parts of the mushroom and sketching it and their note books and cholera
in- and this is very sixty- seven yes said harry create, and I think there is definitely a strong appeal to you. As you know, I think about say taking my five year old to the park and she might say, look at this flower and we can
about how the sun and the rain help it to grow and noticed how many puddles at has re holler. So of course children's curiosity.
does drive a lot of their learning and there is an intuitive truth here. So what emerges from this experience that Lucy Coggan has in the uk?
eventually comes out of this as a strong philosophy that she has a theory that children can use these curiosity inquiry based methods to learn anything including how to read okay. So how does she proceed down this path?
Interestingly, she gets her phd in teaching children had our rights, not how to read and
does something in writing education that is really revolutionary. You no prior to the work of Lucy call guns and colleagues of hers, a lot of teaching children how to
right was really row. It was boring and it's about spelling grammar penmanship and while those things aren't
and they might not have really sparked kids desire.
Right or out much and what lucy Hawkins dead is she took the concept of sort of a graduate school writing
Shop for adult writers, where you keep a journal? You practice writing about your life and she said: let's have it
century school writers do this and what was really interesting about them
as that, when elementary school kids were given writers, no books and journalists and
They were encouraged to write without focusing too much on stuff like spelling. Many of them really could do it with
Yeah, for many kids, not for all but from any kids, did work really well, and teachers absolutely loved this, so lucy call kinsey nome
the eightys and ninetys? She became so beloved fur. Her writing workshop technique for young children, but she starts to hear more and more from teachers and she notices herself when she is going across the country. Training
dictators that four kids who struggle with writing reading is really at the core that reading as the fundamental scale that they need to get down if they're going to become great, enthusiastic writers. So she decides that she wants to start exploring creating her own approach to reading something that would draw upon what she seizes. The strands of what she did with writing, something that centres the child. Let's their curiosity, guide the curriculum and gives the student a lot of free choice and what do you eat and so at that point, in the late nineteenth and early two thousands she begins to branch out into the teaching of reading. So what happens when she brings this approach to read it
So she comes out with a book in the early two thousands called the art of teaching reading and it very much calls back to her earlier work on the art of teaching. Writing she takes a workshop approach. She gives children a lot of free time in the classroom to sort of pick books and quietly read. She starts doing this in kindergarten.
Can a foreign students for the most part cannot read write what they're doing quietly when they are called him quote. Reading is really just flipping the pages unkind of looking at the picture, in the words not actually reading,
and she has a real approach to founding outwards or fanatics. She's skeptical,
that interesting. She acknowledges that funding as part of learning to read, but rather than sort of spend a lot of classroom time, teaching, children, the court,
finance between the letters on the page and the sounds be here and spoken language. She caution that doing this and choose structured of away is really going to turn
kids off, and she even says if a kid is struggling to correctly read the word: don't have them found out the letters that is not how you should prompt them. Instead, you should have them flipped back through. The
just at the book consider the meaning of the story, look at the pictures and think about what word could be right, really interesting. So the
approaches, fundamentally not about fox. Maybe
even a little antibiotics, she might were that's too bad if you set it that way, because what shall say, as I always said, there was some place for it, but that's really not what teachers took from her writing and from the speeches she gave. They took from her writing and the speeches she gave that focusing too much on fines is going to harm children. They should be thinking about the meaning of stories. They should be enjoying the pictures on the page when they struggle. They should guess, guess what the word is based on the meaning of the story and the pictures that they see don't lay.
over the letters and the word of actual. How influential does this approach that Lucy Hawkins is? It sounds like pioneering become very influential. An asthma and literacy grows and lucy corkins curriculum materials spread out across the kind
there's a big upside for her business. She
Then, in addition to being a professor at columbia university, she has to private companies of domestic prime
company anna foreign, one that sell these materials and sell teacher training across the united states and around the world.
And by the early two thousands. It becomes the primary way that teachers and graduate school of education are taught to cheat.
children how to read- and it becomes the way that-
about half or more of american elementary schools teach kids and to give you an example of how much success she's had
selling. This curriculum new york city, the largest district in the country, which educates one million children in the early two. Thousands under mayor Michael Bloomberg,
chile, man data that schools use lucy, colchians methods and materials, while so to call back to date of the beginning of our competition to the degree
there's, been a big long battle in this country over the right way to learn to read between the science of reading this fanatics based approach and balanced literacy. This lucy corkins approach. It sounds like around this point by the time new york city is adopting this in such a profound way, as are so many other districts, the lucy coffins approach. Balanced literacy is winning
yeah have salute me, that's true, but while she was pushing the thought across the country and it was wielding so much influence, and so many teachers and students were falling under its re, there was something else happening that was really casting doubt on whether this is truly the best way to teach children how to read
all the way back.
The new york times games. Make me feel, like I'm amazing whirl, makes me feel things that I don't feel from anyone else. The times crossword puzzle busy companion that I've had longer than anyone outside of my immediate family you and K ailing. Is that he's, but unfortunately, on the issue of her, I started word or a hundred ninety four days ago, and I haven't yesterday, I absolutely love spelling bee. I always have to get genius. I really like, where aids that use few letters, but give you a lot of points, falafel falafel,
they see new yell at it had to say that should be our earlier. You should be aware my proudest crossword achievement is my four minutes. Fifty four seconds saturday, when I can finish a hard puzzle without, hence I feel like the smartest person.
World when I have to look up a clue to help me. I'm learning something new. It gives me joy, every single day join us and-
they all near at times, games at and why times, dot com slash games subscribed by june twenty ninth to get a special offer. You didn't tell us about this doubt that starting to emerge about balance, literacy and lucy colchians, now very popular best selling approach Gatorade ass. Well, there are always voices indistinct,
her approach into the bounds, literacy philosophy and are really important group of dissent or parents of children with dyslexia. They were saying
I kid is not learning how to read and school. I went out and I had to pay with
I own money for really expensive, tutoring and guess what the tutor dead with my child, what taught them fanatics
interest and all of a sudden, my child, he was diagnosed with learning disability and was released. Struggling is at least able to get the basic stern is able to read, and why should I have to pay for this? What about parents who can afford to pay schools? You have let us down interesting by those parents, were sort of siena squeaky whales advocating for their product
her children, and perhaps they were asking for something that was right for the general group over our eyes, got it and I think school districts side as a niece request.
large degree, so you're saying dissent and doubt a little bit gets disregarded and may be kind of bulldozed. Yeah
yeah. Now here's a really interesting thing, starting
ninety nine days functional magnetic resonance, imaging,
m r. I machine allowed researchers to look at the brain of a reader of
learning to read of adult readers and it really
not a lot of light on how it is that reading takes place in the brain and what did a fund it found.
that, while we are reading, were using a lot of those parts of our brain that we use for speaking and listening and those parts are doing the hard work.
Connecting those letters and words on the page to what we all do. Naturally, no
do as human beings, which is to speak until
simple language? That's what reading as reading as the work of connecting letters and words to the sounds of spoken language so does
understanding of reading as being profoundly auditory and
what you ve been describing of Lucy hawkins work. She has deliberately de emphasised that
notion of sounding out words and a rigorous way,
the mri machine made are really helpful intervention here it gave us some really big clues that Lee
putting out the sounded out peace, the fanatics, peace,
he's going to really do children a disservice. So by the time we see coffins, reading curriculum is becoming a send, an adopted in places like new york city and, as you have told us, there is actually anecdotal evidence that it's not working for key groups of kids like those with dyslexia and then this scientific
Hence the entire approach is basically kind of wrong based on how the human brain works and how we learned to read, write and what happens over the past
six or seven years as that the doubt grows and grows due to a few key developments. First of all, there is all of these test scores
coming out that are showing that it's just so persistent that about a third
heard of children in america- do not have basic reading skills and from a civil rights perspective. Although all children are affected by these reading problems, they cut across class, they cut across race. It is the fact that low income children are affected most by these problems, and so there is a real equity issue here too, and so people are frustrated, and so that draws more people to learn about the science of how kids learn to read and become familiar with this doubt that exists about balanced literacy. I think scientific research for tron
reading has progressed enormously and has yielded findings that are absolutely rock solid and there are some really and poor and writers and thinkers that start to speak out. One of them is more exciting burke. He publishes a book called language at the speed of sight and what this book dies he's a cognitive scientist. It tries to bring that cognitive science to educators, child whose learning to read already knows something about spoken language quite a lot, and their immediate problem is to figure out how it relates to spoken, like
and he goes out- and he really gets quite a lot of attention for this book for a long time, and no one really knew how children learn to read, and it was more debates among people had philosophies, lots of and there's a crusading journalists,
asked her name is Emily hanford she's an odd
A journalist with american public media, she starts to publish a series of audio documentaries about kids with dyslexia,
about how we learn to read. Schools think their teaching kids to read. Of course they do, but it turns out. There is a big body of scientific research about reading and how kids learn to do it. This research shows there are important skills that all kids need to learn to become good readers
and in lots of schools. They are being taught me skills and many many people listen to this in the education, while teachers are sort of email in these pod cats to each other and saying oh, my gosh
and this is a real emotion, hot time for teachers who are for the first time, some of them after twenty thirty years in the classroom being exposed to cognitive science on how kits learn to read and many teachers, I've interviewed have described to me a sort of nagging sense that something was off, that they had you thieves balances,
see methods the best way they knew how that they had really enjoyed going to those summer training programmes with Lucy colchians. They admire
her they loved, reading her books and for teachers who just had that feel
maybe that they weren't reaching all the kids that they want to reach who tried their best for years to find out that all this time there was powerful, persuasive evidence that other methods are more effective
It was a devastating emotionally psychologically dominating for many educators. What you're describing Dana sounds like a huge clash in the making all these teacher
and parents, learning that the way they have been teaching or that their kids have been taught to read was wrong or off. Food is podcast her through this cognitive psychologist and yet lucy coffins curriculum is still being taught across the country. So at some point that clash does arrive and it must become a spectacular. Yes, you note the problematic use of bounds, literacy and I have experienced at first hand both as a mom and a legislator over the past five six years. A major change has occurred
having been an educator and having many of us on this converts committee, it is amazing how trend cycle through and they're, not always good trends me
and more policy makers were clued. End to this debate that was going on about the signs of reading show. Today,
I'm calling for renewed focus on literacy
on the way we teach reading in the state of ohio and dozens of states started to pass laws actually requiring that
extra funding, be taught in elementary entry schools. He ya'll, we don't have a science based reading curriculum in school district, we dont teach children, onyx and dozens of school districts began to pull lucy colchians curriculum out,
class or embassy. Did you read about the mississippi miracle yesterday that mississippi's waiting scores
the shot, the way we see it in places like mississippi washington, D c. As representative naacp, we look at this as a civil rights issue. Our kids have to be able read and it has to start the state, the state constitution.
It was good education, council, open california, where the end ablaze, CP was crucial in asking that lucy coffins
I'm not be used anymore, while a real coalition of people laughed rights, civil rights groups, educators, parents coming together to push for change in new york city, more than half of our students are not on great love and then a sign of just how big the shift is. New york city, Lucy, corkins, hometown, the first big district, her really embraced her approach, onyx and funny mc awareness as the mid
in far too many of our schools and we're going to fix that has decided that her materials are no longer on the approved list of ways to teach kids to read in the country's largest school district. A huge blow
our curriculum and I have to enter into a reputation methods, and this puts a lot of pressure and lucy compounds and the product which she is trying to sow, which is a reading curriculum that does not include much products.
So what did she do? After initially resisting and fighting back, a huge turn happened. She starts to acknowledge that she hasn't done, may be quite as good a job if she could
in including the signs of reading and products in her curriculum,
about one year ago. She made an even bigger change
created a version of her curriculum which, for the first time, included daily, structured finance lessons, and that is now foresail across the country. So she recognized
but she has missed a pretty big boat here,
the story of how american kids learned to read and she adjusts
in a way that I imagine given the philosophy that you ve been describing here, given her background that experience in england might have been very humbling and difficult, I think it was really really painful for her.
and last year I d get the opportunity to have a really long interview with her about her process in coming to terms with us and probably the biggest question I had
was given. There has been science suggesting that funding is really important for children. The mri research, but even prior to that dating back to the nineteen sixty is. How is it that it's only been in the last few years that she made this change, and what did she say? What I feel right now is the last two or three years. What I've learned from the science breeding work has been transformational and has religion.
We are far better educator yeah and you know it really wasn't all that satisfying of an answer. She told me
She had clued into this the last few years, probably after only hindrance. First, near starve
she mentioned the journalist mentally hanford. She meant
and mark Seidenberg. The cognitive psychologist I spoke about.
in other words, she was coming across this really powerful research alongside
aid. So many members of the public who went away on a minute had other first that that's a hard concept to swallow for a leading educator press wouldn't be leading educators when it comes to reading, and somebody who works at a major university somehow had blinders on and never heard of the science. That said
that phonics was essential and her system had fundamental flaws. Do you find that credible
so, I really tried to draw down on this with her over the course of several interviews.
Or that were there ever opportunities for someone like you to meet with someone who looks at reading from a neuroscience type of backing. How often, if
murder that happened, then maybe it never happened. I don't know what you suddenly keeps it that there's not opportunities to do that.
One of the things that really came out and our conversation is that she was working very much in the realm of theory,
philosophy and ideas about reading these romantic ideas about child driven learning, the child's curiosity driving the class.
the right, you're being a guy as opposed to a sort of the bearer of information, and this was an ideology that was.
very strong in the part of the academy, the part of the university world that she came from home. I don't think that I thought about an mri machine is part of how you get to know a reader
Then, as she said to me, she didn't think of an mri machines as a crucial piece of evidence in how kids learn she said. Those types of researchers did not spend time in classrooms. That was something
Created scepticism for her and many of her colleagues like we spend time talking to teachers watching kids in classrooms. Those cognitive signed has never go to Kay twelve schools. They don't know what an elementary school is like. There was a sort of resistance there to accepting that those experts had much to say about what schools do. All that makes a certain sense data
but I am mindful of what you said about Lucy corkins, which is it she's selling a curriculum. So isn't it possible as well that this is a person who resisted absorbing evidence that her
Regular was wrong because she made a lot of money selling that curriculum. You know I can't look enter her soul and know what drove
I think that we all know that when our economic interests alone,
with something we believe and really deeply. It's gonna be
we really hard to doubt that right doubly hard so difficult, and I think that's what happened here he, but where I will give her credit
as that there are other leaders in the bound literacy world who have not made the changes that she has made and have.
Even acknowledged even up till now, twenty twenty three that anything was wrong. How does Lucy coffins and I'm sure of it, came up in your conversation with her think about the concept of accountability here, because, according to the science and research she and those she worked with heavily
lots and lots of kids astray string. Did you feel guilty for basically leading so many people to embrace of form,
the teaching of reading that we now think has been somewhat discredited. I pushed her on this. I asked her about it. You know some critics, they want something more like an apology from Peter upset to me. There needs to be almost like a national reckoning or
Even pass ass, fer reading issues in the country, I think that people who have supported onyx first would be wise to learn from from others and that sure they could apologize. For you know not trusting teacher,
not giving kids important engaging projects to work on not kidding classrooms that are vital, and I think that that we all of us do the best we can and.
and she turned the question around with and she said actually does. I think those who pushed fanatics so heavily? Oh
energy, they are and why she said. I think they own apology for overlooking the
cartons of joy, overlooking the importance of,
Writing is. Is there it? You know. Are people asking whether whether they're going to apologize for overlooking writing for for not inviting kids to to bring their own important knowledge and stories to the classroom? Are they going to apologize for not building on kids' strengths? I I think not. All of us are imperfect only we do the very very best we can and hopefully we're we're willing to say you know, and I need to keep listening to others in other.
words she sort of drew upon. What she continues to see is the strength of her approach, as opposed to, I think you know truly acknowledging that something was really really wrong. Does not sound like someone taking a lot of accountability or sounding at all regretful, which is may be the case that she's not
she has not personally.
He really offered the apology,
Many parents and teachers are looking for and when we decided to do this episode, I did we
back out to her team to ask her if our thinking had changed since we last spoke, and they said no, they referred me back to that.
You shall ready gave me last year, but one big thing.
Change, though, is that these new materials are for sale and she has told the fifteen to twenty percent of american school.
That are using her old materials that they should update and if they wanted by the new stuff they can get a discount.
so, even though folks may be looking to her for more of an emotive response, I do think there will be positive change first schools in her network by seeing the fact that she is no longer sally
The old approach from what you're saying another result of everything: it's happened here, this journey that we ve been on, that's ended or its ended is that doesn't may be hundreds of school d
across the country are now changing how to teach kids to read. I have to imagine that's a pretty messy process, because you're talking about curriculum that are in place that teachers have been taught how to use and
don't suspect! That's like flipping a switch to really hard. It's really expensive. You don't have to replace the curriculum material and the book than the classroom. Libraries. You have to retrain that adults in those, after some of whom
I still believe in this, so it's a very difficult shift, so how's it going and what does it look like in a district like the one we're in new york city, the biggest school district in the country? While I have some personal experience with us, my daughter is finishing up her kindergarten year.
Here in new york city public schools in brooklyn and die at the beginning of the school year, she brought home these books that are really hard for her to read because they don't have to.
and funding for their more balanced,
That is, the library box. Like mixing collars,
we started out looking at and it was frustrating to try to read the books with heard. Her teacher had asked us to look at them at home, but she was really struggling. She was having trouble finding out those words because they were a little bit hard for her
but I will say about halfway through the year. I noticed a huge shift. My daughter's principle is introduced
stick about these changes, and she has been asking teachers to reconsider what they're doing in the classroom and about how
way through the year. My daughter tie, you started telling me c h goes shut,
Aids goes shut and just in the past few weeks she started talking about
what happens when you- and I are next to each other or o in you, and so she has absolutely loved this, and I have noticed a huge,
and in her ability to sound out the word, she's being taught fanatics, and it sounds from what you're saying like she's now a better reader. As a result,
absolutely. She has made huge strides. I have to ask you a complicated question: you're, a parent of a kid in new york city, public school system, who it sounds like, was being taught some of the stuff that now feels like
doesn't really working for a little bit of time on and how long.
Do you find yourself mad at lucy calkins at all, you're, not just a journalist, in this case your you're, a parent you're in new york city, public school system? Where how do you think about that? You know that's a hard one. As a reporter, I try to stay above the fray and be objective.
of course, as apparent I'm not, and when I'm struggling with my kid to to too you know, teach her not to look at the pictures, but to look at the world.
When she is learning how to read. I have to admit you. I feel very frustrated by at the same time,
There were some things. Lucy corkins was right about funding alone,
It's not enough. Kids do need access to books; they need a big vocabulary
writing is really important and universal,
many things and raising children? We do want to be guided by their curiosity. It's just that learning to read real
we are learning to read as hard and it is not natural children cannot teach us to themselves. Fanatics is the crucial building blocks,
and professor corkins under sold at
The thank you very much. I appreciate and can make up we'll be right back.
Here's what else you need general aid. On monday, there was growing evidence,
that. Ukraine's long planned spring counter offensive against russian forces, which could change the course of the war may have begun ukraine's military.
undertook a sustained barrage of air and ground or tax along multiple
sense of the wars. Frontline include
the russian occupied region of dont. Ask in ukraine's east. Much is riding on the counter offensive whose goal is to repel russian forces and liberty, ukrainians living under russian
true. Success could strengthen Ukraine's case for a longer term military commitments from the west and improve ukraine's negotiating power in any future peace talks with russia to these episode was produced by mood is eighty will read: ricky, nevsky and clear test scatter with help from city opera
he was edited by mark george and least odious, contains original music by Diana wallis,
mary lozano andean power and
was engineered by chris, would our theme music is by Jim.
and then land of wonderingly
That's it! I'm michel barco, see tomorrow.
Transcript generated on 2023-06-07.