The Reading Symphony

Episode 5: How Connections Build Reading Comprehension with Whitney Whealdon

• Katie Megrian

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In this episode of the Reading Symphony Podcast, Katie Megrian hosts Whitney Whealdon, a career educator and learning architect. They discuss the critical role of background knowledge in reading comprehension, the development of Louisiana's ELA guidebooks, and the importance of coherent and aligned literacy curricula. Whitney shares insights from her career journey, innovation in curriculum development, and the Wonderwood app, designed to help children build knowledge. They also explore practical ways parents can support their children's literacy development at home. Key takeaways include cultivating curiosity, leveraging interconnected knowledge, and advocating for robust science and social studies instruction.

00:00 Welcome to the Reading Symphony Podcast

00:30 Introducing Whitney Whealdon

01:33 Whitney's Journey in Education

03:23 The Importance of Background Knowledge

08:58 Curriculum Transformation in Louisiana

32:43 Building Knowledge at Home with Wonderwood

43:09 Final Thoughts and Resources

Where to find Whitney:

Additional Resources

Welcome to the Reading Symphony Podcast, the place where clarity meets compassion. This is where families and caregivers get evidence-based trustworthy information about how reading develops, how to understand reading progress, and how to turn overwhelming information into simple, actionable steps that help every child thrive. I'm your host, Katie Megrian educator, parent, and relentless advocate for helping every child become a joyful, confident reader. Let's get started. Hello everyone, we are so lucky to have Whitney Whealdon here today for our conversation about knowledge and comprehension and curriculum. I wanna give you a little bit of background about Whitney. She is a career educator and learning architect whose work in literacy curriculum and educational technology has had national impact. She led the design and development of Louisiana's ELA guidebooks and is the founder of Wonder Wood at Learning Tapestry, a knowledge building app for families. She writes at the Secret Life of Learning on Substack, bridging ideas and everyday practice to help parents and educators support strong reading comprehension over time. So, Whitney, I look forward to your weekly substack so much. They usually drop on Sundays. It's this mix of cognitive science and philosophy that not a lot of people can hit that balance really well without it being like too much of one thing and not enough of the other. And you just write so brilliantly. Oh, thank you. I love that. I would just love for you to start by telling us how did your career start and take us along the arc to where you are now. Yeah. So I started as a classroom teacher in Louisiana, in St. Francisville, Louisiana. I taught middle school English language arts and loved it. Funny story, when I was in high school, in one of my AP classes, we had to do a career thing. And a friend was gonna be a middle school English teacher, and I was like, that sounds like the worst possible job ever. And I was like, yuck. English, yuck. Middle school. Like, it was just terrible. And then that's where I ended up and I loved it. And I was there and then moved to the Department of Education in Louisiana and I was an education leader there. As you said, I wrote the guidebooks, started assessment and then moved to curriculum. Now, as you said, I work at Learning Tapestry focus on learning design and architecture, which is basically the hidden parts that impact how and what we learn. And so it's often you don't hear about us because we're usually in the background doing and we typically cover all subjects. But I mostly love to talk about literacy, so I'm excited to be on the Reading Symphony and share more, thoughts about all of that. So yeah, I also started out as a middle school teacher and we'll never forget those early days in the classroom. Yeah, I did. I didn't think I would end up there either. And I did, and I loved it so much. I know it takes a special time. They're like independent enough that you can really challenge them, but they still are very affectionate and wanna please you. And it's a nice blend. Now there's definitely tons of stuff that comes with middle school that lots of people don't wanna handle, but I loved it. Yeah, they're so impressionable. But it definitely takes a very special kind of person to, to teach middle school, and especially to stay in middle school. I'm always just so amazed when somebody tells me they've been teaching it for 20 years. Yeah. I still have colleagues that are there. It's amazing. So, you have written a ton about the importance of background knowledge on comprehension, and so I'd love to hear a little bit about when that concept entered your consciousness as a teacher. I mean, it's interesting it was always in the background of my career, but I don't think I ever acknowledged it as a thing until I was at the Department of Education and we were working around implementing the new standards and understanding some of the research. And it was like, at that point it all clicked, like, oh, that's why I always did all these things, but I didn't always, I wasn't always cognizant of it myself. So, I have either seen or been a student of basically all the types of literacy instruction or reading instruction. I was a whole language student, so whole language was big when I was learning how to read. So Reader's writers workshop was like, that's how I learned in elementary school. But when we moved to middle school, all of my English classes were combined English and social studies. So I learned how to analyze text in the context of knowledge cause I was learning about history at the same time I was learning about literature. And so that just became ingrained in me as like, this is how you read, you just do this. And so even though I took a lot of AP classes and learned a lot about like literary analysis and that type of thing, when I started teaching, I was really more focused on literacy than literature. And what that meant is I was very much always about trying to figure out what were they doing in science and what were they doing in social studies, and then how can we talk about things around us and what we're observing and how we're engaging in the world and learn how to read and apply what we're reading to those things. And so again, it wasn't something that I was just like, oh, this is what the research says. It's just something I was brought up to know how to do. And I remember when I was a student teacher, my mentor teacher at the time, she suggested doing something called knowledge stations that she had done when they were reading Julius Caesar. And so that kind of was a method that I just started adapting. So we would do a bunch of knowledge building and creation before we would read and then. Then it became this thing where it was like we were trying to do a bunch of front loading of knowledge, and that started revealing how many gaps existed in my students' knowledge. And I knew it was a problem, but I knew as a middle school teacher, I wasn't gonna be able to fill those. So I was really just doing triage. I wasn't actually building knowledge through those stations, but I was, I think, through the way I was setting content up. So I did teach a lot of text sets and like different types of things as a teacher, but again, I didn't really know about that until started digging more into research when I was at the Department of Education. And realized at that point that it was so crucial and it was like, duh, why didn't I know that before? But it seemed obvious, but unfortunately it wasn't something that was obvious in the practice of teachers. And I think now thanks to Natalie Wexler's book and the Science of Reading movement and lots of things. There's been a real push and a lot of Daniel Willinghams work around the need for knowledge. And so as a result, I think people are starting to see we need to do this, but not always sure how to. I remember when you were talking about the social studies immersion piece, I was brought back to, gosh, I think it was like 2016, and we were using our social studies curriculum as the backbone of our literacy curriculum, which sounds really exciting and almost ahead of the curve in some ways. And I remember my boss was like, this reporter Natalie Wexler is coming to just check out our curriculum. Can you meet with her? And I met with her. I had no idea where it was going. And, thought we were just doing the best work in the world like we were. We had units on Egypt and world religions and all of these things. And in the book came out and thank goodness she was actually quite nice. She could have been a lot more searing, but what she mentioned in the book was it had this potential to be great and it was still a lesson on finding the main idea mm-hmm. Couched within this really rich content. Mm-hmm. And for me, that was such a big wake up call and I admire her so much and it changed my practice so much, but wonderful that that was something that was just naturally there for you as a student that informed your practice. Yeah, there's a report that came out very recently within the last couple weeks from SRI about the thing you described, which is like, even folks who have adopted knowledge building curriculum often are still couching it under more like skills-based discreet skills, having a strategy of the week type thing, instruction. When I was a student and we, so my seventh, eighth, ninth, and 10th grade years were combined social studies and English amazing. So I had four years in the very like, pivotal time of my learning journey was combined humanities and I know there were standards starting to come about then, but I think largely, that really wasn't the water they were swimming in, and so that's probably why it was more knowledge based than anything. Something that I love talking about with parents is Louisiana and if you're not in education, it's still not something necessarily that people know about and Right. It's incredible the work that you led there. Thank you. And so I'd just love for you to talk a little bit more about the curriculum transformation that you led and what Louisiana saw as a result of that work. So, honestly, that work started way before I even was at the Department of Education. So I started teaching in 2003 and as you were saying No Child Left Behind was like early two thousands, so there was this push toward more accountability and Louisiana really got on board pretty early and work started around 2005 and which is, 20 years ago. So even though it's an amazing story, it was not a quick turnaround as much as it might seem, but that early work was really unseen and if you would go back and look at it today, people probably did similar type of work, but for whatever reason, Louisiana ended up on a slightly different path. And so the work I'm describing is, there were standards and then they had grade level expectations. But when I first started teaching before all of this, the state, we had something called the middle school concept and teaming. And so when as a teacher, I was co-planning with other teachers, we had a period at the end of the day, teaming time where we can meet with students. We didn't have bells, so we were able to have more flexible and adjustable schedules. So the experience we were creating for students was way more coherent and consistent. In a grade level, then you might see in a more traditional schooling model. So again, I had just a really great journey and opportunity as a student and then as an early teacher to have these really awesome mentors and experiences around me that, and have built up my own personal philosophy and knowledge about how I think it should work. And so really with no Child Left Behind, that's really where it started, was this idea of accountability. And then the state Department took over more of a centralized authority through policy. And that's not something you see in a lot of states'cause some states are still very local control and there's a real fear or hesitancy to develop that centralized authority. But Louisiana really enjoyed, and I say that word not as in like happy, happy celebration, but enjoyed or benefited from having the ability to have more centralized authority and so that started with this idea of policy and support around that policy. And then it ended up in a more, a place more of coherence and alignment. And what that meant is we started by putting out again, standards and then created something called the Louisiana Comprehensive Curriculum, which, love it or hate it played a role in the journey of Louisiana because it made teachers see the State Department as someone who is providing that level of support. Like, you're gonna assess us, but you're also giving us support on what we can do to reach what you're gonna be assessing us on. There was not alignment at that point between the curriculum and the assessment. So it was a rocky start, but the idea of setting up that system and again, that expectation that the state would provide something like that really was to our benefit when I joined the Department of Education because when we switched to the common Core standards, it was like, okay, we have a new set of standards, so where's our curriculum? And I was really hesitant. I really pushed hard at this first'cause that's just as crazy seeming, like, why would I tell teachers what to do? And so, that opened the door to allow us to create a new vision for what specifically English language arts instruction would look like with the standards. And then that moved into, okay, now let's train teachers in how to do this and let's focus on implementation. So it was a series of things that kind of built on top of each other, but really the goal and the guides was to get the coherence and alignment or maybe alignment and then coherence and then that idea was really pervasive throughout. That's always been my goal like, can we create a more coherent experience? Something that just works. Like the system just works for you rather than against you. And even as all of that was in place, like the first time we put out the guidebooks and we were doing a focus group, I was just gonna share a story of what life was like, pre guidebooks. We walked into, we were doing focus groups. We walked into a high school and they were reading Kafka's Metamorphosis and they were so proud to come in and show me what they had done. And I was expecting like, some kind of amazing writing or whatever. And it was a picture of- now these are like 10th, 11th graders- a picture of their bug, like what bug would they be? I was like, oh no. There was a lot of like arts and crafts in ELA. And so again, I think some of that was recommended in some of our early comprehensive curriculum assignments and so they were doing what was asked of them. No fault to them. And so we were like, okay, we really have to show them and bring them along to show them a different and better way, raise those expectations. So with the knowledge thread of the guidebooks, can you talk a little bit about how that worked in terms of developing teacher knowledge on the importance of background knowledge. Yep. So I was fortunate early on to get involved in some of the common Core standard writing. And so I met Meredith and David Leman pretty early on. And, I always called them standards ninjas because I said you, you're like in here creating standards, but you're like also advocating for another way of thinking about things. And I met Sue Pimentel pretty early on too. So I was doing a lot of work outside of Louisiana at that level and trying to understand and learn a lot. And David Shared it was about the latent semantic analysis through Landauer and Dumais, University of Colorado Boulder, I think. Plato's Problem was the title of it. Anyway, it was talking about this idea that the problem was we teach a certain set of words to folks, but yet we can understand not an infinite number, but so many more. And so it's like how could the inputs be so limited, but the outputs be so vast and like what is happening in the brain? So that's what they went to figure out. They created this model called the LSA, the latent semantic analysis, which is actually a precursor of our modern day ai, which is a really interesting factoid. And it was mimicking how we learned vocabulary and it discovered that it's like a neural network. Again, that term is very present today in our conversation around, around ai and that we are not storing, like word and definition, we're storing relationships. And so as we read, it's like the network in our brains something like gets bigger or smaller and like we like re-situate and reorganize and there's a flexibility to it where we're able to make connections and draw inferences unconsciously, almost like in our brain to like to learn and understand things that we may have never been taught. And I think Marilyn Adams even said that we often learn more about what's not in a text than what actually is in a text because it's like, it's pruning and saying like, okay, well if I'm reading about cats, I'm seeing these words related to cats and I know that dogs are related, but it's not mentioning dogs. So do these words really relate to dogs? So that's all happening in our brains, and we aren't even always even aware or cognizant of it. Anyway, so when I read that, I was like, that just clicks. That is how I've always operated. And so as we were doing the guidebooks, the whole idea was this idea of a text set, which really aligns well to this whole idea of the LSA and that as you're reading about common topics or ideas, you're learning all this vocabulary. Yes, you still need to directly teach vocabulary, but you're getting the benefit of that structure and that system and you're gaining even more and you're accelerating even more of the vocabulary learning and knowledge learning. And so we set out with guidebooks, we had a group of teachers in Louisiana and I said, let's just create text sets. So we started by just creating text sets. And so we started by looking at what books are people reading in school like already. And so can we build sets around those so that way it doesn't feel like a completely new set of things you're having to do. So we started with text sets and we shared those and folks were like, that's great, but what do I do with this? And so then we created a unit for one tech set per grade. And in doing so, there were lots of factors that we had to take into account book access. I learned a lot about publishing. I had no idea that books were not just like sitting in a big warehouse in the middle of nowhere, that people just went and grabbed them. At one point. Pirates, literal pirates. Took control of the boat of books that were coming to the states for schools. What? Yes. They were probably so disappointed when they found out they got a bunch of books. So a lot of the giver. Exactly. So yeah, I learned a ton about a lot of different things. So book like access, like how many copies of the book were available, complexity levels, the time a teacher would have to read, the different types of activities the students might do with those books. So we had to take all that into consideration. So those initial text sets really evolved and some fell away because they just weren't able to be turned into any kind of curriculum. And then at the same time we were also trying to, we really moved away from aligning to standards and really focused on can students read, understand, and express their understanding. And so we just kept coming back to that idea. And we used standards or like the concepts of standards, so things like point of view or vocabulary or theme or whatever it might be. We use those to help identify the kinds of things and the kinds of questions we might ask. But we really didn't stick to this idea of a standard a week or unpacking the standards. We really focused on can they read, can they understand and can they express their understanding in a meaningful way? And just kept coming back to that, which is the other essence of the common core, this piece around complex text. Mm-hmm. Which when I think about Common Core, that was the thing that resonated with me the most at the beginning. It sounds like you were focused on let's get them great texts and bind them together with related texts that build that background knowledge and get them reading these challenging complex words. And even in your bio you talk about building strong reading comprehension over time. And I really noticed that because it's sort of that"get rich quick" approach versus the"let's do this for the long haul." Yeah, that's such a good point. I'm very anti gamification of things because it ends up in that get rich quick type of mentality. Yeah. And it is about patience and building and development and crafting, again, going back to the idea of architecture, like designing a system that works for you and then you're just like re engaging in that system over and over again. And having the faith that that's gonna lead to real learning and deep understanding. And so you asked about, and I didn't address this part, but like how do we help bring teachers along? Mm-hmm. So, we really benefited from and enjoyed the idea that people relied on the state for curriculum. So when we rolled out the curriculum, there wasn't so much a pushback from teachers of you expect me to do what? It was more like, oh, great, thank you so much. I'm so glad I have this. And then it became more about helping them understand the ideas and the design behind it so that then when they're reading it and looking at it, they can see why we're making different decisions and not other decisions. So you could still use the guidebooks and do the like standards, skills, like gamification approach if you wanted to. But we pushed really hard on this read, understand, express, and we said that in every training and everything we wrote about guidebooks, we would say that over and over and over again. And then we shared a lot of details about the latent semantic analysis. We shared a lot of, as articles came out about knowledge building and its importance, we shared a lot of that and we would do trainings on that. I built a thing called the Reader Circles, which basically what it was was helping people think about how they might think about the process they engage in comprehension because so often when you're a strong reader, you are not cognizant of how you're comprehending. You just do it. Right? And so then when it comes to teaching kids how to do that, it feels very hard because it's hard to label because often you're making connections that you aren't even aware you're making-the whole LSA thing, right? Like things are happening, things are lighting up in your brain that you're not even aware of, lighting up. And so these reader circles were the idea of trying to visualize for them this building and pattern recognition, for lack of better term. For example, if an author starts the book and this is literary, we also have them for informational text and literary nonfiction. But if an author starts a book and is describing, like in the Christmas Carol is describing a character as like miserly and greedy and all these negative words, like you see that over and over again, and that is a pattern. And you're like, oh, I now recognize this character in a particular way. And then at some point there's a shift and then the words that are used later might be more and his heart open. And I don't know mm-hmm. Off the top of my head. But, and that if you look at that contrast that reveals something like that is part of those inferences and things that lead to comprehension. And so helping to make explicit or make. Aware label or conscious what those processes look like. So that was that, that we did a lot of trainings on those reader circles. Mm-hmm. And it was funny when they would click for people, they're like, I get it. Like it wasn't about following a checklist, it was just about a mindset in a way of thinking. So just to clarify, the text sets, were they built around novels? Yeah. So we tried to use whole books as much as possible. A lot of the texts that went with the novels were more, sometimes they're excerpts, but often they were full articles or short stories or poems. But yes, we tried very hard to include every text set to be anchor. We had an anchor text, which, and there were different models of how that text would be taught, meaning sometimes it was an anchor and so you would go read something and then come back to the anchor and you would read something else mm-hmm. And come back to the anchor. And that might read something else, might be a different perspective or it might be a informational text about some idea that was hard to grasp from the anchor text or whatever it might be but sometimes they were an opener and so they might kick off a concept or an idea. And then the text that followed were all different aspects of that idea. Sometimes those openers were shorter text, but usually when we had a true anchor that you kept coming back to, it was a novel. Sometimes it was hard'cause getting, finding the time to read longer text was difficult. But yeah, we tried to focus on novels. Mm-hmm. And there's been, for our listeners, there's been a lot of attention recently around the importance of reading whole books. And so I'll link some of those key articles to this as well. So thinking about this from a parent perspective, most states aren't doing it this way, and you have may have a better view nationally than I do, but in Massachusetts at least, it's very district-based. But if a parent is listening and they're like, this sounds awesome what's happening in Louisiana. I'm pretty sure my child's school isn't centering knowledge building or text related to a particular idea or concept. Do you have any advice for how they might frame a question or push a little bit from the edges to try to make some change? Yeah, so this one is interesting because, I come from a place of ELA and for sure there's movement to be made in ELA around curriculum. Even as we had that whole background of years of people used to using a curriculum from the state there still is pushback of you can't tell a teacher what curriculum to teach because the teacher needs to figure that out. And that is true to an extent, but we had to do a lot of educating around, curriculum is really more of a table stakes tool for teachers. It's not just like a nice to have. One thing that came about that was a surprising benefit, which I don't know if this will help parents, and I will get a little bit more to directly answer your question, but just wanted to share, the thing that the curriculum did in Louisiana is it really created a level playing field across all the classrooms. We use the term in technology a lot about interoperability, which is basically the ability to move between different systems but without hiccups. Like you can actually share information across systems and when we have a bunch of like disparate curricula. It creates these silos of classrooms and student experience in that classroom. And then when they move to another classroom, they're getting a completely different experience and that, that feels very odd to me because we're educating children in a building together. And so let's do that together. And so, having the shared curriculum or common curriculum creates more openness among teachers to be able to share ideas and not feel like it's a constant competition of I have to do a better job and this teacher over here, or I can't let them have access to this thing that I developed because it, it is like gold and I get great results from it. And that competitive spirit doesn't, in my opinion, serve learning for children. And if that's our job and what we're out to do, let's do the best job we can to serve the children we're serving. And so again, there's a mindset shift to be like, I want that because my job is to serve children. My job is not to be this bright, shining star teacher. Mm-hmm. I have experienced that myself having that sense of, I don't wanna share that, that's mine. But this openness, I really think benefits children. The reason why I'm sharing that is because even in places where there is an centralized authority, the district has the ability to create some commonness and having that sense of we're all in this for the kids, these are all our kids. Even the ones that you're teaching that I'm not actually teaching, how can we make that experience better for them, I think can benefit schools. And the learning for kids. And so I don't know if it's a question for parents to ask, but it's just a mindset that I think is a healthy one personally. The other thing that is on my mind around- this is often because of assessment testing, statewide testing, we end up spending a lot of time focusing on ELA and math and spending a lot of time in the day on those two subjects. And often science as studies get short shrift. And, I would love a world where we still need foundational skills for sure, and we still need to read literature for sure. But coming from a humanities background, is there a reason why there can't be more interoperability among the content areas and there could be, and I'm just brainstorming here, there could be, time to teach science. And then there's like exploration science that involves text. Or there's time to teach social studies and exploration involves text. There's time to read a novel. And then there's exploration in science and social studies mm-hmm. Around like different ideas or things that align or are brought up in those novels. So it just feels like there's some, more openness or to use a technology term interoperability that could exist among them. And so I think understanding from a parent perspective how much time is spent on science and social studies, how much time is spent engaging in books and texts that are not just to learn some kind of skill, but like actually to engage in conversation, to talk about the world, to talk about what it teaches them about themselves or others or what they now learn that they didn't know before. And I visited a school district here locally in April with the Knowledge Matters campaign. Mm. And that was something that they were sharing that kids were really excited to share what they knew. And that they were, they cared about what they were learning and they were like, mom, dad, did you hear? Did you know this? And when the parent at the meeting was like, I had no clue about that thing and the fact that my child was coming home and sharing it was just amazing to me. And I think that was really, that's the biggest shift, is this idea of like kids understand why and have a purpose in doing the work. And that purpose is not to pass a test or answer questions for a test. And I think we sometimes lose sight because that feels so heavy in everyone's world. But, I do think asking about how much time and focus is spent on science and social studies, where a lot of the knowledge building happens is something that parents could really focus on a lot. That's such an amazing, simple, but often forgotten point. Mm-hmm. I think that it's a huge thing that we can advocate for. Just as you were mentioning the science piece. So at our district in Massachusetts, we use EL education. Mm-hmm. And my second grader had a very robust half year bird unit last year. Yeah. And she knows a lot of facts about birds now. And she's really into dodo birds, which is not part of that curriculum at all, but tangential. But you see an extension. Yeah. That's awesome. Yes, exactly. So we were at the library yesterday and she's like, mom, I really wanna find a book on dodo birds. And so we found this book called 10 Birds That Changed the World. Anyway, we got to the Dodo Bird chapter, and the way that it was structured started with a quote, and then it was in italics, which was clearly the journal entry that the author had written, because then it was normal text underneath it. And I was explaining that sometimes authors do that. They'll add a older reflection. They're doing dinosaurs right now. She's like, yeah, I think that I read a passage that a paleontologist wrote like that from their journal entry, but the person who wrote this book would've been an ornithologist. So anyway, it just, such a beautiful example. I did not teach her any of those words. I took her to the library to get that book, that word was in her head and would not have been had she not spent six months talking about birds. But again, great, great advice to ask and advocate for robust science and social studies instruction. So I'd love to pivot because there is a lot of advocacy that we can do as parents to ensure that our kids are getting a curriculum worthy of them as learners, but we can also do some work at home. And I never wanna say the onus is completely on families to teach reading because that's on schools. Right. But there are some things that we can do and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the work that you're doing with Wonderwood on your app and any other ideas that you have about how we can, as families and caregivers, build background knowledge at home that will then support reading. Yeah. So first off, I love that your daughter got excited about a topic.'cause that just means that that lit up something and that sparked something else, which is amazing. And that you went to the library to get a book. Mm-hmm. So, when I was teaching middle school there were a lot of blanks for my kids when they would come to me'cause they just didn't get that knowledge and they weren't spending a whole lot of time trying to get knowledge outside of school. And we have such a limited amount of time with kids and there's so many factors in a classroom. It's almost impossible to like truly address everyone's personalized or individual interests. So, while you hope that the topics that you're identifying will be interesting enough to grab the majority of the kids' attention and engagement when you're working with them, that is not always going to be the case. And so children spend more time outside of school than inside a school and could be doing a lot to support their interests in driving their own knowledge building which could hopefully spark a similar type of thing that they might then ask a question in school and get more information there. And so the reason why we started creating Wonder Wood was more of an AI challenge honestly, of what could AI enhance that we couldn't do before, but could make a difference for learning for kids. And I immediately thought about knowledge building because when we were doing guidebooks, we did these let's set the context type things at the beginning where it was like, let's just preload and front load a bunch of knowledge so then they could actually just engage in the complex text. But those connections are impossible in the moment to truly address if you're in a classroom with 30 kids and every kid has a slightly different experience coming in and a slightly different set of things that's lighting up. Like how are you gonna be in that moment as a teacher and be like, oh, okay, this is what this means and here's how you make this inference. It just feels impossible. And I started thinking about this idea of how could we, like AI technologies have a, a lot of faults for sure, but they tend to have a lot of knowledge. They have access to a lot of information. And so we started thinking about what would it look like if we could provide experience for children where they're curious about a thing and then they go on a journey where they start noticing and wondering about other things and they're constantly fed another text that's like, oh yeah, I wonder about that too. And, oh, now I'm gonna follow this. And they could do that somewhat independently so that that way they're gaining that information and they're lighting up all of those areas in their brain and learning and so that's why we started building Wonderwood. Could we create an experience like a wandering through the woods of like oh, you like, see this branch over here. And you go to investigate deeply and you're like, oh, what's this over here? And you move over here. And so this idea of thinking of it as like a knowledge path that a child is following and creating for themselves in collaboration with this app. So there's a bunch of topics. Kids can come and select a topic. They get information and images about that topic. They can follow a path. So like hamsters to kittens, to habitats to et cetera. Or they can go back to the beginning and pick another topic if they so choose. And then we have a Facebook group called the Knowledge Builders Club for Families creating a curriculum that makes use of Wonderwood, but each week is a new topic. And we provide a set of texts that a parent could go to the library and get those texts to engage in the questions and activities in each week, or they can use Wonderwood or a combination. But starts with maps. And then it goes to communities, and then it goes to food. And so each week is a new topic, and the whole idea is what do you wanna know about this topic? What questions do you have? And so there's a phenomenon or some kind of like instigating stimulus that they engage in to learn a little bit about the idea. And then they ask questions. And the hope is that parents can at dinner engage in like, oh, you know, what questions do you have about maps? A kid might say, oh, how do they get made? And so then it's like, well, let's find out either through Wonderwood or maybe if you've checked out one of the books we have, you could then explore that together. So the hope and idea of both Wonderwood and the curriculum that you can get through the Facebook group is that parents could go down the path that you were describing, which is giving them a little bit of guidance and some prompts and different handouts or tasks they could do, but could involve the whole family. The idea is instead of it being a bunch of disconnected topics, each week is building on the next. And so when they get to week 13 and it's forces, they are, I don't know if that's actually week 13, but they're drawing on week six, which was energy. And so it's all interconnected and you can actually see the building of knowledge over time. I think the hope is that parents can expand knowledge at home and continue to build on it and spark some curiosities that they could then explore in school too. I love that it's learning for learning's sake, but in a way that's coherent and linear. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I have a kindergartner and a second grader. Is it meant to be the kind of thing if I went into the Facebook group and find the curriculum, can they both be doing it at the same time? Yeah. We tried to write it for kindergarten through third grade, so we were saying like ages five through 10 or so. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But there's some activities in there, like the week of coding, it's really hard to find coding resources for kindergartners. Yes, we include some for sure, but there's definitely some resources in there that are more middle school level. Mm-hmm. Okay. So some of the topics lend themselves more to older. Some lend themselves more to slightly younger, but the hope is that it's a little bit ageless and the way and the tasks and conversations. The structure of the curriculum is the acronym build. So, you begin with wonder. So on the first day, they engage in some kind of activity phenomenon they might listen to different sounds of travel, for example. So they hear a boat and they hear a train, and then there's some questions that are prompted in the curriculum. But then it's like, this week's topic is travel. What do you wanna know about travel? So there's an initial thought of like, I wonder about this. What do I notice and what do I wonder? And then the second day is they uncover ideas. So that's where they're supposed to dig into books, either from the library or Wonderwood and actually learn some things. And so they have a knowledge map where they can write out what question they're exploring and then what they learn and then reflect on, did I learn a thing? How did I learn it, what do I want? What more do I wanna learn? What new questions do I have now? And then I as inquire further where they show a little bit of what they know. So after they build some ideas, then they do some actual demonstration. It's not assessment per se, but the idea is they should show a little bit of like, I've learned this thing. Now I'm gonna go learn something else, building on this thing that I now know. And then L is learned by doing. And so the idea is that they actually go out and observe in nature, or they might go on a field trip to, for communities, the suggestion was go to a post office and sit, observe for an hour and who shows up? So it's actually engaging and seeing and observing things around you. And then the last day D is decide what's next. So then we now learned this. What do you wanna keep learning. And it preps them for the next week where they have a new topic that builds on the ideas. So they do that every week and that's the curriculum. And it's something that, you could do with all kids of different ages and it's very flexible. We provide some ideas, but feel free to bring your own creativity to it. Endless, I'm sure. Yeah. That is so cool. And I'm just thinking how interesting it would be to save all of the different wonderings and then see what the connections are over time. All of these different concept maps and how so many different ideas converge if, even if they seem like they're in these disparate topic areas. So yeah. That's so, so cool, whitney. So what's the name of the Facebook page again? It is the Knowledge Builders Club for Families. I'll give you the link and I'll put it in the show notes as well. And then for Wonderwood, I have it. My kids were going down a rabbit hole on Pollinators last night and loving it. Um, so it's so cool. I believe it's 4 99 a month. Yes. A month. Which I was thinking like, if you compare that to what we pay for Disney Plus or some of those other subscriptions that definitely don't have the same knowledge building impact, it feels very well worth the less than$5 a month. And I'm excited to think about how families could leverage the Facebook page in the curriculum if their child is in a knowledge building curriculum. We don't wanna necessarily force connections that aren't natural. Right. But it's a broad enough list of topics that you have on there that there just are going to be ways to draw connections, which is really exciting when we can do that. Yes, for sure. And yeah, our hope is that it would be something that kids could spend 10 minutes a day on it. Or while you're cooking dinner or something like that. And the hope is that it's not something that will be a huge lift to take on, but you could make it part of a dinner conversation. Or you could make it part of a car conversation or whatever it might be. And as you were saying, if they're learning about something specific in school, then yeah, we have I think 78 different topic menu items that they can choose from but they all connect to each other too, so, you know, a little bit endless. Beautiful. So as we end this conversation, if you could leave parents with one big take takeaway what would you want them to be thinking about? So I have always been compelled by connections. So when something connects in my brain or when people connect to each other, or it's like, oh, we have this in common, or, oh, I see why I did that. Or this is now paying off, like I was experiencing all these pains, but now all of a sudden it just connects. It just works. It's that like architect systems type thinking. So this idea of connections has always been pervasive throughout my life and something that I always seek. How can I make things more connected, more cliquey. And so I would say that comprehension is what happens when children or readers are able to make those connections, and whether that be to something they already know or something that they learned as they were reading, but they're able to make those connections within a text even. And so to make that happen, you have to know a lot. And so really for parents in particular, like raising a strong reader is definitely about foundational skills for sure. Like they have to know how to read the words on the page, don't get me wrong. But raising a strong reader is really about feeding their curiosity about the world and helping build that foundation so those connections can happen and those clicks can happen. And think that would be the thing I would leave with folks is like the idea of connections, but also the idea of let's develop a curiosity and inquiry about what's around us. And so that we're constantly trying to learn more and more and more so that we can have those connections. That's beautiful. And it's so exciting to think about the impact that you had on Louisiana and now that you're doing broader work, and I know some exciting things in the future with some of the writing and research you're doing on comprehension and you know that weekly substack is gold, so let's give families who are listening a little bit more information about where they can find you to learn more about your work and your ideas. Yeah, so it's Secret Life of Learning on Substack. I'll share the link so you can share that with folks. And then the Knowledge Builders Club for families on Facebook. Those are probably the two easiest ways to find me. And then I'll just share my email in case it's whitney@learningtapestry.com. Feel free to email as well if someone has a question or thought or whatever. I love to connect with folks as I said earlier. But yeah, those are probably the two biggest is the Secret Life Learning and then the Knowledge Builders Club for families. And the Knowledge Builders Club for families will connect folks to Wonderwood Well, I've learned so much and I know our listeners will too. So just very grateful for your time today and to have you on here so early in the evolution of this podcast. Thank you for the opportunity, Katie. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to the Reading Symphony Podcast. My hope is that each episode leaves you with more clarity about what actually helps children become skilled, joyful readers. If today's conversation was helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would follow the show. Leave a quick five star rating or review and share this episode with a friend or teacher or another parent who cares deeply about kids. Those small actions make a big difference in helping this work reach more families. You can also find resources, deep dives and practical tools for families by subscribing to my free weekly substack newsletter at katiemegrian.substack.com And you can connect with me on Instagram thereadingsymphony Until next time, take care. And remember, reading doesn't happen by accident. It develops when the right parts come together.