Inlay

Global educator living her best life, mom, writer, speaker, creator of the Global Read Aloud and always in search of a great book and a cup of tea. Now a primary teacher ❤️ in DK 🇩🇰 Used to be a teacher in Wisconsin, 🇺🇸

Reading belongs to every child — not as a skill to master, not as competition for their phone, but as one of the last truly private spaces they have. Here is why we need to stop framing it as if it is in competition with devices.

Our kids' brains have been rewired and we are still teaching like they haven't. Here is what that means for our classrooms and ten things we can do about it starting Monday.

We turned our tiny classroom library into a space students could navigate—sorting books by genre, wrestling with fiction vs. nonfiction, and learning through messiness. A lesson in reading, teaching, and yes… failure. But worth every minute.

This is the work. Not forcing reading or offering rewards, but building spaces where children feel safe enough, curious enough, and seen enough to want to read. Before we change students, we have to change the conditions we create around reading.

He's a good reader. Bright. Funny. And all year he's told me there are no good books. This post is about what I finally realized — and a free tool to help.

A new piece on something I keep thinking about — the readers we already had. The ones who loved books and slowly, quietly stopped sharing that with us. Not because they stopped reading. Because the room stopped asking. Three small moves that might help.

What We Can Actually Do Before Summer For the Readers Who Need It Most I have 43 school days left and I can already feel it. That quiet guilt that starts sneaking in sometime around May. The one that whispers I did not do enough this year. That the readers in my care will walk out that door in…

We are allergic to boredom. Our students are too. But what if boredom is exactly what they need? This year I have been trying to bore my students on purpose. Here is what that looks like.

We talk about reading as if it is in a race. As if every time a kid picks up a phone instead of a book, reading has lost a point. And I understand why we frame it that way. The competition feels real. YouTube, social media, every platform built around the endless scroll, they are extraordinary at what they do. The additives of a phone and everything that comes with it, the brain chemistry they tap into, the way they are engineered to keep you coming back, it's a losing race, we cannot compete with that.

He tells me he is bored. As if that is the only reason I need in order to understand why being part of the learning is not the priority. An honest answer, but also one wrapped up in so many questions. What does boredom mean to you? I hear myself say that this is school, it cannot compete with a screen and it was never meant to.

Supporting children who struggle isn’t about fixing everything. It’s about showing up, noticing, and taking small, meaningful steps — building trust, safety, and connection while honoring realistic expectations in the classroom.

Year after year, I hear it more. Even from my youngest readers. "I hate reading." This post is about what to ask next — and a free tool to help. Link in comments.

We have been studying genres in 3rd grade. Something so simple, and yet such a powerful key to unlocking yourself as a reader. For some students, these classifications are crystal clear; they already have the language that wraps around them as readers. For others, the designations are murky at best—confusion between fiction and nonfiction (which I completely understand in this day and age), and even what it means for something to…

This week, I was invited to sit down with with Dr. Sarah Sansbury, Leah Gregory, and Janette Derucki for the Can’t Shelve This podcast (releasing February 10th). The invitation was simple: come talk about reading culture. About what we actually do in our classrooms and schools that either invites children into reading or quietly pushes them away. That kind of conversation is my favorite.

All year I have been working with this one child. A good reader. Bright. Funny. And yet he hates reading. Tells me there are no good books despite me bringing all my tricks. Book recommendations, book excitement, cheerleading and all of that. And then I realized something. It's an ingrained habit now. A quick dismissal. Because if there are no good books then the work stops.

What we track. And what we miss. I keep thinking about the ones who came to us loving books. You know the ones. The kids who wanted to tell you everything about what they were reading, who recommended titles before you could recommend them first, who couldn’t walk past a shelf without stopping. Somewhere between then and now, they faded into the wallpaper.

I have 43 school days left and I can already feel it. That quiet guilt that starts sneaking in sometime around May. The one that whispers I did not do enough this year. That the readers in my care will walk out that door in June and the reading lives we built together will quietly unravel over the summer and somehow that will be on me.

I have been thinking a lot about boredom. And how so many of us, yes, myself included, seem to be almost allergic to it. I am not aware of this obviously when I search for constant stimulus, but my brain is. It shows up in the exhaustion I feel at the end of the day, in the way I can't quite remember the details of my life like I used to.

I have the lung capacity of a 70-year-old. Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a genetic deficit in my lungs and liver. One that can lead to emphysema, asthma, and a whole list of other things no one hopes to casually collect. It made sense. Walking up the stairs while talking would leave me breathless, still does. And yet, hearing that my lungs were not the way they were supposed to be was a quiet devastation.

It seems, no matter what I do, it still happens. Year after year. I started this work in 2010 and the voices were smaller then. Present but quiet. Now, with passive consumerism, with the need to be constantly entertained, with the pressures of life growing for so many kids due to inequity, it seems to have grown to a cacophony of voices.