During the COVID-19 pandemic, Barbara Mullen welcomed a group of children into her home to teach them while their parents were at work. A former elementary school teacher, Mullen discovered something that disturbed her: the kids couldn’t read.
Labored reading, excessive pausing, guessing words based on the first letter, even pretending to read during reading time — Mullen spotted signs indicating the children were struggling to read when they should have been proficient. At first, Mullen thought dyslexia was to blame, but that wasn’t it.
Reading proficiency scores had been slumping since she’d taught school in the ‘90s, she discovered. And teaching methods had shifted away from phonics, she said.
A reading interventionist, Mullen has tutored many children struggling with phonemic awareness in the past couple of years. Phonemic awareness is the ability to link sounds with spoken and written words, and Mullen wants to ensure students across Lawrence are able to master the skill.
At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 21 in the Lawrence Public Library auditorium, Mullen and other parents and teachers are offering a free “reading boost” seminar, catered for parents and caregivers who want to improve their children’s reading performance.
“Our heart is to empower parents to give their children the reading boost they need,” she said.
Downward slide
Mullen has found that children across the country are struggling to read, she said.
In Kansas, students’ average reading proficiency scores have subtly slid downward in the last couple of years. In 2022, only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standards, lower than in 2019 (34%) and 1998 (34%). Low-income students fared worse, with only 18 % and 15 % of fourth and eighth graders reading at a proficient level in 2022. And nationally, average scores have been dropping since around 2018.
In Lawrence, the percentage of students performing at Level 1 on state assessments — a score indicating that the student shows a limited ability to understand and use English language arts skills — jumped to 30% in 2021-22 from 25% in 2018-19. The percentage of Lawrence students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches scoring at Level 1 has also increased, to about 46.5% in 2021-22 from 43% in 2018-19.
“Some kids, they don’t have resources at home, so what do we do for them?” Mullen asked. “I can’t sleep at night. I always think about it. … So I thought, well, I’m just going to offer (resources) to any parent who would come and say, ‘How can I help my child?’”
The seminar will feature resources parents can use to teach or encourage children to master reading. And it will highlight reasons reading challenges some students.
What to watch for
There are some indicators that parents can look for if they’re trying to determine their child’s reading level.
“The sounding out stage is supposed to be slow at first because they are learning, but it shouldn’t be slow after third grade if they have been taught phonics — unless there is dyslexia involved, and then there can be some delays,” Mullen said. “A lot of times (struggles) really show up in their spelling because they leave out vowels and guess by sounds they hear or letters that are called that name.”
A student might spell the word delay “dla” when verbally prompted or writing without a reference because they don’t understand that “D” is the letter name, not the sound it makes.
“Two other big warning signs are hating reading and poor letter formation in their writing,” Mullen said. “The children I work with now all came to me because the parents knew that something wasn’t quite right. The children are smart, curious and hard-working, but the reading wasn’t coming along as they had hoped.”
Mullen believes she and other like-minded parents will be able to reverse the reading proficiency decline for young children locally. And she will impart tips and resources she’s curated for the past couple years to parents who attend the seminar on Wednesday.
Among the tips is to use alpha phonics, a method that teaches basic phonic rules. After attending the seminar, “(parents will be able to) just sit at home with their kids … and teach them to sound out words,” Mullen said.
Mullen is hoping lots of parents come glean the information she has arduously gathered these past few years, so she can help more children learn to read — and so she will be able to resume sleeping at night.
“(Children) have to be able to decode words and sound things out, or they will never get beyond the guessing or the memorizing,” Mullen said. “Reading opens the world to children. They can’t go on without reading. It sets them up for success.”
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Chansi Long (she/her) reported for The Lawrence Times from July 2022 through August 2023. Read more of her work for the Times here.
