How to teach kids who flip between book and screen

Technology is changing how we read—and that means we need to rethink how we teach. Linus Merryman spends about an hour a day on his laptop at his elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly working on foundational reading skills like phonics and spelling. He opens the reading app Lexia with ease, clicking straight through to lessons chosen specifically to address his reading needs. This week Linus, who’s in second grade, is working on “chunking,” finding the places where words are broken into syllables. The word chimpanzee appears on the screen in large letters, and Linus uses his mouse pad to grab cartoon Roman columns and slip them into the spaces between letters, like little dividers, where he thinks the syllable breaks should be. The app reads his guesses back to him—“chim-pan-zee.” He gets it right.