literacy shed book review

The Reading Realm

Book review: stone age boy by satoshi kitamura.

• September 12, 2018

Themes: Time travel, archaeology, destiny, the Stone Age.

Why you should read it: An exciting adventure story set in the Stone Age. Full of gentle humour and delightful moments of surprise and discovery.

Cross-curricular links: History.

Perfect for:  All age groups, but especially children aged 7-9. Book notes and planning available on The Literacy Shed Plus website .

Published by:  Walker Books.

Please do leave a comment if you have used this book in your own classroom and how you used it!

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Innovative EdTech for teachers, educators, parents, and students

The Literacy Shed: Literacy Resources for Teachers

By Med Kharbach, PhD | Last Update: April 30, 2024

The LiteracyShed, by the Education Shed Ltd, is an educational platform that features a wide variety of literacy resources with a special focus on visual literacy. The site offers a a large collection of high quality films and video content for teachers to use with kids in the primary classroom. The purpose is to help kids improve their literacy skills and become independent learners. While most of the video content offered is appropriate for primary aged students, teachers and parents are advised to watch the video content first before sharing it with kids.

As the site owner explained: “The aim is to provide high quality resources that can be used in stand alone literacy lessons, can form the basis for a whole Literacy unit or can support literacy units that you already have in place. With the many book based activities I would advocate using the book alongside the digital resource.”

Besides the Literacy Shed, the Education Shed also offers several other interesting educational resources including:

1. Spelling Shed 

Spelling Shed offers a large collection of resources to help kids learn spelling and word formation. These include printable lesson plans, teaching slides, worksheets, and many more. The platform supports data tracking allowing teachers to see how often kids practice and track their learning progress.

2. Phonics Shed 

Phonics Shed “Phonics Shed is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme with coverage from sound awareness in pre-school, into a full phonics scheme of learning that leads into Spelling Shed’s complementary spelling system.The comprehensive planning and overview documents are accompanied by physical and digital books, flashcards and all the supplementary resources needed to follow a flexible multi-sensory approach. You even get a Joe puppet to introduce to the children and to support your teaching!”

3. MathShed 

MathShed is “a mathematics platform designed to significantly impact the enjoyment of mathematics while improving results. It is built with students, teachers and parents in mind and aims to make learning mathematics facts fun for students as well as simple for teachers to manage. The game aspect of MathShed ensures children are engaged and eager to practise their key maths skills regularly. The low-stakes games, quizzes and reward systems ensure that children find learning maths fun. The games can be played in class or assigned for home learning, making them perfect for in-school learning, homework or a hybrid model which many schools now use.”

4. QuizShed 

QuizShed “helps students to learn in their own way through quickfire and fun educational quizzes. Use QuizShed quizzes in class or remotely. Use with a group, as a starter activity or a consolidation task. Create your own quiz question sets to play or to share. Fully integrates with the EdShed system and includes theming for Spelling Shed and MathShed for subscribers.”

5. Literacy Shed Plus  

LiteracyShed Plus “is a collection of English resources designed to save teachers time with their planning. Hundreds of fully resourced unit plans based on short films and high-quality novels are now available for use across the primary school age range. In addition to these, there are also additional writing prompts, vocabulary resources and display materials.”

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Meet Med Kharbach, PhD

Dr. Med Kharbach is an influential voice in the global educational technology landscape, with an extensive background in educational studies and a decade-long experience as a K-12 teacher. Holding a Ph.D. from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, he brings a unique perspective to the educational world by integrating his profound academic knowledge with his hands-on teaching experience. Dr. Kharbach's academic pursuits encompass curriculum studies, discourse analysis, language learning/teaching, language and identity, emerging literacies, educational technology, and research methodologies. His work has been presented at numerous national and international conferences and published in various esteemed academic journals.

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Outdoor Reading Shed

Our Outdoor Reading Shed is an innovative, convenient, and practical solution designed to spark a love for reading in young learners. It offers storage for books, cushions and resources, with customisable features for different activities. Ideal for creating an immersive learning environment, it fosters literacy skills and encourages a lifelong passion for reading.

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• 100% Money Back Guarantee.
• We give 10% of our profits to charities.
• Environmentally Friendly & Sustainable.

Innovative, convenient and practical; a dynamic and engaging solution designed to ignite a passion for reading among young learners. Our Reading Shed is the perfect storage solution for your outdoor reading needs, ideal for creating an immersive learning environment, encouraging curiosity and excitement of reading that extends beyond the classroom. A charming and inviting space designed to foster a love for reading and learning in children of all ages. Increasing the reading exposure for your children helps to develop their essential literacy skills such as reading comprehension, fluency, vocabulary and critical thinking.

Designed and configured to provide an outside reading stage with shelves spaced for books or baskets of books, storage space for cushions and beanbags, and the capacity to store story props and phonics resources. Easily customisable with different reading activities to suit your children’s learning interests and meet all the unique needs of your class. It also allows you to hang bunting and washing lines for sequencing stories and has a set of chalkboard painted doors for storytelling. 

A perfect all year round outdoor storage resource. This cosy yet versatile shed provides the perfect environment for children to immerse themselves in the world of literature, explore new worlds and embark on exciting adventures through the pages of a book. Join us on the journey to inspire a generation of lifelong readers and learners.

• Durable Construction: Constructed from solid wood, built to withstand rigorous use, play and activities. Designed to endure all types of weather.
• Multiple Storage Options: Shelves spaced for multiple storage options with space to hang bunting or washing lines for story sequencing. Blackboard painted doors of storytelling and organisation. 
• Customisable Curriculum: Easily customisable with different reading activities to suit your children’s learning interests and meet all the unique needs of your children.
• Secure: Our shed is lockable for security and peace of mind, keeping your books and reading resources safe.
• Immersive Learning Environment: Our Reading shed is meticulously designed to create an immersive learning environment, fostering curiosity and excitement about reading.
• Promotes a Love of Reading: Creates a dynamic and engaging reading environment which inspires a lifelong love of reading that extends beyond the classroom from an early age.
• Enhances Literacy Skills: Increasing the reading exposure for your children helps to develop their essential literacy skills such as reading comprehension, fluency, vocabulary and critical thinking.
• Fosters Collaboration and Communication: Encourage collaboration and communication among your children through group activities, discussion and shared reading.
• Reading Nooks: Why not create an outdoor reading nook alongside our reading shed? Simply add cushions or picnic blankets to your outdoor area where children can curl up with a good book and lose themselves in the story.
• Seasonal Rotation: A perfect all year round resource, simply keep the reading experience fresh and exciting with seasonal rotations that introduce new books, themes and activities throughout the year. 
• Inspires Imagination and Creativity: Stimulate creativity and imagination as students explore new worlds, characters and ideas through the power of storytelling.

TEACHING RESOURCES

The jungle book by rudyard kipling 9-11.

Ask the children to look at the front cover. What do you think the book will be about? What things can you see on the front cover?

Who do you think would enjoy this story and why?

Where do you think this story is set? Why? What could the laws of the Jungle be?

Now read the blurb – were any of your predictions correct?

T he following questions are designed as prompts only – allow the children to come up with their own questions and ideas. They will be much more engaged this way.

The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves.

It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents, and of the friendship between the man-cub and Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the sleepy brown bear, who instructs Mowgli in the Laws of the Jungle.

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The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books

“It didn’t even feel like learning.”

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

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R ecently, an old friend of mine from elementary school ran a hand over my bookshelf, stopped, and said, “You stole this.”

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did. You totally stole it from school.”

She pulled out my copy of The Once and Future King , and showed me the inside of the front cover. It was stamped: Board of Education, City of New York .

Okay, so I stole it. But I had a good reason. I loved that book so much; I couldn’t bear to return it to the school library.

My grade-school memories are full of books: bulletin boards that tracked the class read-a-thons, hand-written book reports, summer-reading lists. But a student growing up, as I did, in New York City’s District 20 will have a very different experience today. The city has adopted a new literacy regimen under which many public elementary schools are, in effect, giving up the teaching of books—storybooks, narrative nonfiction books, children’s chapter books—altogether. The curriculum is part of an initiative from Eric Adams’s administration called, ironically, NYC Reads.

Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading

Plummeting reading comprehension is a national problem , but it’s particularly acute in New York City. Half of its third to eighth graders—and 60 percent of those who are Black and Latino—cannot read at grade level . Although COVID drove those numbers down, a big factor has been the much-lambasted pedagogical method known as balanced literacy, which grew out of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Embraced by the city and then much of the nation back in 2003, balanced literacy attempted to teach kids to read not through phonics, but by exposing them to books of their choice in order to foster a love of reading. The appalling literacy numbers speak volumes about the efficacy of this approach.

Elementary schools are now replacing balanced literacy with a different pedagogy, called the science of reading, based on a large body of research finding that learning to read and write well requires phonics, vocabulary development, and content and context comprehension. The Adams administration announced NYC Reads in May 2023 to make sure that schools followed through with this proven approach. “The data shows that young readers learn best when there is explicit phonics instruction, and a young reader cannot experience the joys of reading if they do not know how to read,” a spokesperson for the city’s public schools told me. So far, so good. The schools were given three curricula to choose from, and each district’s superintendent was to make a decision after conferring with principals and parents. Half of the city’s districts were selected for Phase 1 of the rollout and had to adopt a curriculum immediately. Phase 2 schools begin their new curriculum this September.

Although all three curricula are rooted in the science of reading and have met the standards of EdReports—an independent curriculum reviewer—they are not created equal. One, called EL Education, implements the science of reading by using fiction and nonfiction books, such as Hey, Little Ant and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind , to teach students not just to read, but also to talk about real-world issues. Another, called the Wit & Wisdom curriculum, also uses books, such as Stone Soup and Ruby Bridges Goes to School , to “pique curiosity” in students.

But the third, called Into Reading, replaces individual books with one textbook for each grade, all called myBook .

The myBook s are filled with lessons on phonics for younger kids and then, as the grades go up through elementary school, with reading content made up of excerpts of longer narrative texts. MyBook is what is known in education circles as a “decodable text,” but one mom I spoke with, Alina Lewis, likened it to a “Dick and Jane reader.” Where kids used to read and discuss whole books, they now get a few paragraphs at a time and then are prompted to answer a question. Reading has been distilled to practicing for a comprehension exam.

Beginning in September, this is what the majority of elementary-school kids in New York City will be doing. More than two-thirds of its school districts selected the Into Reading curriculum. For those kids, learning to read will no longer revolve around books.

Both the publisher behind Into Reading, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the city’s department of education rejected the idea that this curriculum does away with books. “It is blatantly untrue that any of the curriculum options under NYC Reads eliminates engaging with whole books,” the city spokesperson told me, adding that “80 percent of the selections within Into Reading are full-length kids books.” An HMH spokesperson quoted the same statistic to me.

What, exactly, were they referring to? If 80 percent of myBook were made up of cover-to-cover books, no child’s backpack could handle it. In part they seemed to be counting books that a teacher might make available to students. “Into Reading incorporates multiple opportunities for kids to read full-length books at every grade level,” the publisher’s spokesperson wrote in an email. “This includes whole books that are reproduced within the student myBook but also book club/small group novel reading, classroom library reading selections for small and independent reading opportunities, and read-aloud full book selections.” But teachers, parents, and students say that, in practice, the curriculum doesn’t leave much time for such opportunities.

When I asked for examples of books that were included within myBook itself, the city spokesperson pointed to Kitoto the Mighty , by Tololwa M. Mollel, for fourth grade. Let me tell you: I have now read Kitoto the Mighty . It’s lovely, but it’s basically a picture book. It’s a far cry from a chapter book that builds reading stamina like, say, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing —or a chapter-book series like Alvin Ho that might keep kids devouring book after book for weeks.

O ne sunny day in the spring of 2023, before the Adams mandate went into effect, I hopped on the train not toward Manhattan, as usual, but farther into Brooklyn. I was heading to speak to a fifth-grade writing class at P.S. 503 in Sunset Park, close to where I grew up. The principal, Nina Demos, and I had been first-grade classmates, and had been in touch off and on throughout our lives.

P.S. 503 is located in District 20, the same district that Demos and I had attended as girls. It is now, as it was then, composed primarily of lower-income, Latino families, many of them recent immigrants. When I visited, the students had been writing their own books—graphic novels or chapter books about Latino superheroes, or immigrant kids who missed their old soccer team. We talked about the difference between imagining a draft and the work of revision. They read passages from their stories and peppered me with questions about writing a novel and what Sunset Park was like when I was a kid.

But that was before the new curriculum, which District 20 began teaching in September. Theoretically, Into Reading gives teachers some independence to shape their own classes, but in District 20, teachers and parents say, the rollout has been draconian. Teachers have been subject to constant evaluation to ensure that they are teaching Into Reading purely, while students face frequent assessments to ensure that they’re meeting each benchmark. Little room is left over for class visitors or story time or exploratory reading.

Alina Lewis is a District 20 parent—her children go not to P.S. 503 but to the district’s gifted-and-talented school, called Brooklyn School of Inquiry—and she has led a fierce opposition to the new curriculum. She told me how the first year under Into Reading went at BSI: “They’d come in from the [Department of Education], and they’d literally go into the classrooms and make sure there were no remnants” of the old style of teaching.

BSI was an outlier: Before the switch, more than 85 percent of students were already reading at or above grade level. The data for this year aren’t in yet, but the student reviews are: They miss books. And they’re bored.

At a DOE forum in March, students from BSI’s middle school testified about their experience with the Into Reading curriculum. “It didn’t even feel like learning,” Carlo Murray said. It “felt like the state test prep that we do every year.”

“We are this far into the school year,” Kira Odenhal said, “and unfortunately we are only reading our second whole book.”

Though the city’s spokesperson told me that decisions were made after “a rigorous engagement process with superintendents and communities,” many District 20 parents felt blindsided by the new curriculum. When BSI’s principal announced the district’s choice at the school’s May PTA meeting, Lewis told me, “the parents went nuts; we flipped out.”

Lewis was well-versed in all three curricula. A former teacher and school administrator, she was a doctoral candidate in educational theory and practice when the mandate came down. Equipped with her experience and research skills, and without a 9 to 5 to tie her down, Lewis organized a campaign to obtain a waiver for Brooklyn School of Inquiry. The students were so disenchanted with the new curriculum that enlisting other families to her cause was easy.

They wrote letters, met with the superintendent, attended meetings of the DOE—including the one in which children testified about missing books—and courted local press. And they won: This fall, Brooklyn School of Inquiry will be allowed to return to its own curriculum.

F ew other Phase 1 schools have access to a parent with as much time and know-how as Lewis. If you look at a map of Phase 1, you’ll see that it includes many districts in the city’s most heavily immigrant, Black, and brown areas. Just a single district in Manhattan is in Phase 1, and it’s the one that covers parts of Harlem, East Harlem, and Spanish Harlem. In Brooklyn, Phase 1 skipped over District 15, which includes wealthy Park Slope, and District 13, among the highest ranked in the city, which runs through the posh areas of DUMBO, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, and what, to me, feels like the most gentrified slice of Bed-Stuy. I know because I live there.

“It’s not an accident who is Phase 1 and Phase 2,” Lewis told me. “I think we took them by surprise because they literally sought all the either Black and brown districts or the heavily immigrant districts. And they figured they’d be quiet.”

The DOE disputes this. “The socioeconomic demographics of a district were not among the deciding factors,” the department’s spokesperson told me. Instead, districts were chosen for Phase 1 because they had had greater exposure to the new way of teaching already, she said: “The districts participating in Phase 2 were districts where fewer schools were familiar with the new curriculum and therefore benefited greatly from the additional training time.” It’s true that many teachers had already started relying on Into Reading. This is, in part, because during the pandemic, when teachers were scrambling for materials, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt made all of its courses free online. But the city’s rationale raises the question: If the curriculum is so good, and many schools are already using it, why are their reading scores so low?

The rollout in District 13 will be very different from that of District 20. Being in Phase 2 gave the schools an extra year to carefully choose their curriculum. The superintendent, Meghan Dunn, held focus groups with parents, meetings with principals, and even sit-downs with representatives from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the nonprofit groups that created the other two curricula, so everyone could better understand which would align with the district’s needs. Dunn met with at least one school’s PTA to assure them that teachers would still have flexibility in implementing whatever was chosen.

That school, P.S. 11, like Brooklyn School for Inquiry, also had high reading rates, and parents were deeply concerned about fixing something that wasn’t broken. Unlike many other affluent city school districts, District 13 is notably diverse, and wanted to be sure that the chosen curriculum would be sensitive to that. In January, Dunn sent parents a letter announcing that she had selected the EL Education curriculum and outlining the process behind the decision. She explained that teachers would begin curriculum training immediately—giving them an additional five months of professional development that teachers at Phase 1 schools were not afforded. Her letter closed with her commitment to fostering “proficiency and a love of reading and writing.”

T he Park Slope district went with Wit & Wisdom. So did District 2, the one that includes the Upper East Side. Not one of the city’s three top-ranking districts selected Into Reading. But 22 of the city’s 32 total districts did.

This is especially surprising given that a 2022 analysis by New York University had criticized Into Reading for lacking stories about or written by people of color. Across the grade-level texts, for every 100 main characters, only 18 were Black, 13 were Asian, and 12 were Latino. The texts “used language and tone that demeaned and dehumanized Black, Indigenous and characters of color, while encouraging empathy and connection with White characters,” the report concluded. For a school system that is 65 percent Black or Hispanic, and 17 percent Asian, that is a pretty damning critique. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released a statement saying that the report was “deeply flawed” and “mischaracterizes Into Reading as a whole.”)

How, then, to account for the popularity of this curriculum among school administrators? One answer might simply be good marketing. Another might be ease.

As a large corporation, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was probably better positioned to advertise its curriculum than the nonprofits that own EL Education and Wit & Wisdom were. Into Reading was already familiar to many teachers because of its availability during the pandemic. Those who hadn’t yet used it were likely reassured by its reputation as the easiest for teachers to unpack, which was a significant upside, given the short window Phase 1 schools had for teacher training.

When asked about this short window, the DOE replied that Phase 1 teachers all “received professional development throughout Spring 2023, with makeup sessions during the summer” and “individual coaching” through the school year. But teachers have been vocal about feeling unprepared, according to the education site Chalkbeat .

Into Reading is also the only curriculum available fully in English and Spanish, making it a reasonable choice for a school with a lot of ESL students (though this is a particularly cruel irony in light of the troubling findings about its racial bias).

P.S. 503 is not a gifted-and-talented school. Its student body includes ESL learners and students with learning disabilities. About 47 percent of its students score proficient in reading. This year, according to Demos, the principal, the data look comparable or slightly better than the year before. But she notes that that has been the case every year for the past nine years. Demos has criticisms of Into Reading, but she admitted that “there are aspects of it that I appreciate more than I thought I was going to.” She said that its insistence on assessments and standards seems helpful for students who are reading close to, but not quite at, grade level. “And I do think that that is something that I feel is successful, and that we as a school need to reflect on. Like, were our practices in the past holding students in that category back? Has this curriculum helped us push the rigor for those students?”

The improvement among those mid-performing readers is proof that the shift away from balanced literacy toward a science-based approach is correct. But New York could have done so much better than this rushed rollout, the loss of teacher autonomy, and above all the depressing myBook itself.

“The requirements and the mandates are so excessive,” Demos said, that teachers have no time to help students engage with books for pleasure. This was something the BSI students complained about during their public hearing. Demos recounted a parent saying that her child is “doing really well with this curriculum,” but that the child wasn’t having the experience of “falling in love with a series, falling in love with reading.” (One wonders whether Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thought this through: Training the next generation out of the habit of reading books doesn’t seem to be in a book publisher’s best long-term interest.)

Read: How to show kids the joy of reading

When we were kids, I used to go over Demos’s house, and we’d lie in her room and read. She introduced me to the Little House books. We’d talk about Laura and Mary Ingalls as if they were our friends, too, as if we lived not in Brooklyn but out there on the prairie. When Demos talks about kids losing their love of reading, the loss feels visceral to me. I had some amazing teachers over my years in public school, but I had some duds too. The books we read expanded my mind, regardless of who was in front of my class.

Knowing how to read is crucial, but loving to read is a form of power, one that helps kids grow into curious, engaged, and empathetic adults. And it shouldn’t belong only to New York’s most privileged students.