Unbuild walls with your kids
Hey, reader. I appreciate you being here, and I know you have a thousand other things to do, so I’ll try to keep this short. Read (or skim) on to learn about my work unbuilding walls - from teaching and learning with incarcerated kids, to teaching and learning with Tucson kids (maybe yours?!) in the great outdoors, and creating warm, welcoming learning environments on the world wide web where we can all be at home together.
Detention Center Update
Teaching incarcerated young people continues to break my heart and open it at the same time. My youngest student is 11. All my students have survived multiple ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) like poverty, abuse, and loss of a parent. For some kids, this is the first time in their life they’ve gotten three hot meals a day and full nights of sleep. It’s common for kids to tell me that this is the first place where they've read an entire book cover to cover. Hearing stories like that give me a weird, nauseous feeling as alarm bells go off in my gut: We don’t need to incarcerate kids for this to happen! My kids are making enormous progress in reading and writing - but I go slow and leave space for emotional processing, as I always do with any learner living with complex trauma.
Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poetry has been a favorite with my teen learners. If you haven’t read him, check out his poems. He landed in prison after a harsh childhood, learned to read on the inside, and went on to become an award-winning writer.
they give me pain, so I live with pain,
they give me hate, so I live with my hate,
they have changed me, and I am not the same man,
they give me no shower, so I live with my smell,
they separate me from my brothers, so I live without brothers,
who understands me when I say this is beautiful?
who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms?
-from Who Understands Me but Me by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Outdoor Mindfulness Class for Tucson Homeschoolers!
Thanks to parent requests, mindfulness classes start February 13 in gorgeous Fort Lowell Park. We’ll meet by the playground, with occasional forays to the duck pond and waterfall. We’ll kick off by celebrating self-love and making valentines for ourselves and others, and in coming weeks, we’ll use movement, play, and art to practice skills like attention, focus, self-regulation, managing feelings, communication, and conflict resolution. This is a low demand, neuro affirming environment - kids with disabilities welcome and encouraged to join! Scholarships available for people who don’t have ESA funds. Please sign up in advance on my website, and invite your friends. Small classes are nice, but to bring in the magic of parachute play, we need a bunch of kids to join.
Black History, Black Futures
Happy Black History Month! This is a great time to bookmark pages like Diverse Bookfinder and Social Justice Books and return to them all year long. Check out the classic Golden Legacy Black history comics, or these graphic novels for middle schoolers and teens.
If you have a younger child, I highly recommend Prisons Must Fall by Mariame Kaba, Jane Ball, and Olly Costello (pictured above, and in the title image). Mariame Kaba is a brilliant organizer, teacher, archivist, and Black history expert. I have learned so much from following her on Bluesky and subscribing to her newsletter.
As more people join the call to abolish ICE, it’s a great time to examine connections between immigration justice and the movement to abolish police and prisons, who have been kidnapping people and separating families for generations. Check out the Prisons Must Fall resource list for tips on learning with kids of all ages about how we build a better world beyond criminalization - a world of care, repair, and community.
From Cacophany to Symphony: “The Reading Wars” and Linguistic Phonics
Oh, friend, I could talk with you all day about the "reading wars" - the fighting, the polarization, the grifters hawking all-in-one curricula based on “THE Science,” as if science is a fixed and singular thing. I could talk about why I think a nation with the largest military and prison systems on earth somehow only gets ~33% of young people reading on grade level, but... that’s a story for another day.
What I’ll say today is this: I used to dread teaching reading, handwriting, and spelling until I switched to linguistic phonics (aka "speech-to-print”). I became an EBLI (Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction) practitioner in 2025 after deep research in dyslexia and special ed communities, where I found many people who switched to EBLI after years of OG (Orton-Gillingham) - and no one who switched to OG after EBLI. That’s saying something: once people turn to linguistic phonics, they don’t go back.
I love linguistic phonics because it’s as pragmatic as it is intuitive. I teach learners to use their voice, trust their ears, and sound things out through writing. I teach pattern thinking, not rules and memorization. Ultimately, I teach learners to teach themselves. If someone you love is struggling to read, write, or spell, and you’re feeling as tired as I did back when I taught sight word memorization, spelling and syllable rules, and all that dull stuff - check out this 6-minute EBLI video, or watch this brilliant panel on linguistic phonics, or read this fascinating article about how speech-to-print works. Or visit my tutoring page and schedule a chat to tell me more about where you are in your literacy journey.
Most of my virtual classes on Outschool are full at the moment, but in many cases, I can open a spot upon request - message me and let me know you’re interested!
I’m also starting virtual social circles for tweens and teens in March, outside of Outschool. We’ll practice listening, speaking authentically, exploring emotions and perspectives, and collaborating in an autonomous, youth-led group with me as mentor and guide on the side. Look out for dates and more details in my next email!
Donate to support incarcerated youth
My job is underpaid and I have no supply budget. Thanks to generous donations from friends and community members, I will be able to buy more high-interest, age-appropriate learning materials, and donate more time to design the lessons my learners need.
SEND A FEW BUCKS WITH VENMO"No one educates anyone else, nor do we educate ourselves; we educate one another in communion, in the context of living in this world.” - Paulo Freire
Kate O’Rourke, Prosocial Learning, LLC
