I hope you all had a wonderful time at the Winter Literacy Conference! If you're able to leave a conference with at least one new thing you can turn around and use in your classroom, then it was worth it. Since we all went to different breakout sessions, take a few minutes to share something you learned that will be useful for your classroom. If there's something from the keynote speaker, Nancy Akhavan, that you found especially helpful, share how you will be able to use that information.
I attended the "Making Vocabulary Connections" session and discovered the book Les Trois Cochons by Sheila Herbert Collins that can be used to teach students how to use context clues to determine meaning. (It also shows how background knowledge is important in determining word meaning as well.) This book is a version of The Three Little Pigs with some French words tossed in every now and then. Students are able to use their background knowledge of the original story, look at the stems within the words, and use the rest of the sentence to determine meaning of the French words.
And kudos to Jamie and Christy on a great job with their book club session. If you missed their session, be sure to ask them about book clubs in their classrooms. They've been having great success with them!
14 comments:
I attended Dianne Hartness's session titled "Advocating Literacy in Your Classroom and Your School." She passed along a great tip about the website www.donorschoose.org. Dianne has gotten one of her requests for money granted (woo-woo... free stuff for the asking), and has two more requests waiting to be funded. She said she was required to take pictures of the students reading their new books, and then mailed these pics to the folks who made it possible in order to prove she did what she said she was going to do with the money.
Like Diane I attended the session that looked at the French version of The Three Little Pigs and was wowed at how much the read aloud was able to highlight the literacy skills targeted in this very class. I, like Lola, hope that the conference will be back at Airport next year so that teachers could work at tables with their standards and teachers with similar backgrounds. I would also like to see more workshops geared toward the high school teachers next year because most of the workshops were geared toward the elementary crowd.
Winter Literacy Conference: I did not attend because I am a full-time student at Columbia College and spring classes conflicted with the conference.
I presented last year at the Winter Literacy Conference held at Airport High School with Laura McNair. We presented information concerning anticipation guides based on Janet Allen's work with the South Carolina's Department of Education. Participating in this conference was a wonderful
experience for me.
I really enjoyed the literacy conference this year! Both of the sessions I attended were helpful to me and I am able to bring some of what I learned into my classroom. The first session was “Making Connections Real: Putting Practice into Theory”. The presenter discussed the importance of everything we HAVE to do everyday in our classrooms and then said it is great if we can tie it all together. Her example involved her middle school English class in which they were reading parts of novel as well as doing vocabulary, journals, DOL sentences, etc. everyday. Her suggestion was to have everything that had to be done that day relate to the book in some way. The vocab words would be pulled from the book or could describe the book. The DOL sentences would also relate to the book. For instance, if the passage they were reading that day used a lot of semi-colons then the DOL sentences would deal with semi-colons. The journal topic would relate to a theme or idea from the book and so on.
The next session had an actual SCRI study group from high school share information about strategies. Each member of the study group taught a different subject or had a different job within the school. They each chose one strategy and discussed how they used it within their subject area. This was a great way to see how the something I use for ELA can be used in a Spanish class.
I really enjoyed the literacy conference this year! Both of the sessions I attended were helpful to me and I am able to bring some of what I learned into my classroom. The first session was “Making Connections Real: Putting Practice into Theory”. The presenter discussed the importance of everything we HAVE to do everyday in our classrooms and then said it is great if we can tie it all together. Her example involved her middle school English class in which they were reading parts of novel as well as doing vocabulary, journals, DOL sentences, etc. everyday. Her suggestion was to have everything that had to be done that day relate to the book in some way. The vocab words would be pulled from the book or could describe the book. The DOL sentences would also relate to the book. For instance, if the passage they were reading that day used a lot of semi-colons then the DOL sentences would deal with semi-colons. The journal topic would relate to a theme or idea from the book and so on.
The next session had an actual SCRI study group from high school share information about strategies. Each member of the study group taught a different subject or had a different job within the school. They each chose one strategy and discussed how they used it within their subject area. This was a great way to see how the something I use for ELA can be used in a Spanish class.
I love how we're getting to all benefit from all of the sessions. Thanks for all that you're sharing!
I really enjoyed the Winter Literacy Conference. The first session I attended was with Diane Hartness. Her session was fabulous. The most important thing I took from her talk was the idea that we all need to be more politically active. We need to be proactive in having conversations with our legislators about what we need in order to do our job. She had great handouts on contacting our legislators by phone, email, letter, etc.
The second session I attended was the presentation by the Ridge View High School SCRI Study Group. I was impressed with what their Health Tech Teacher had done with Journals to the 3rd Power. Diane Hartness developed this idea, and Diane Starnes gave us a copy at one of our classes. This health tech teacher had her students read the book The Pact. Her students were able to really connect to those young men and what they wanted to do with their lives. As much as I enjoyed their session, I bet our group at Airport could have done even better! If you have never read The Pact, you should!!
This is from Annette...
As I listened to Nancy Akhavan, I realized that we are following the path she advocates. We glean essential learning outcomes from the standards and develop instructional strategies to help our students reach those outcomes as well as common assessments to determine whether they have attained the outcomes. We could probably do better at focusing on the components of the standards with a laser-like vision. Asking “What does the standard look like in practice?” would help teachers formulate that focus. I liked her directive to provide “teaching that will stick.”
Like Joni and Lola, I went to Judy Franchini’s session, “Like Sand through the Hour Glass.” I connected Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development to the contextual knowledge necessary for new learning to take place. This concept emphasizes the importance of collaboration to support learning and change. Again we have confirmation of the value of creating a professional learning community. Also, during discussion in this session, one of the participants offered a really great response to “I don’t know.” “I know you don’t know; but if you did, what would you say?” Every time she had heard her literacy coach use that question, she had heard a response from the person who had said, “I don’t know.”
I also attended Christy and Jamie’s session and felt very proud of our Airport people. Christy did an excellent job of modeling the process of students’ choosing a book. I now want to read Fade to Black.
LGoodwin said...
I attended the session entitled Think.com-Building a Literary Community across the Curriculum. The presenter was from Chapin Middle. This is a wonderful website that teachers can use to post assignment, check homework, and communicate with their students. We were able to visit student web pages and read their responses to their homework, book clubs, and various surveys. The district has to approve this website and the teacher has control over what the students can post. I was very impressed with the work of these middle school students.
I also attended Jamie/Christy's session. I was wondering exactly how they managed to have book clubs and still teach their curriculums and they explained it beauifully. Thanks.
3:40 PM
I enjoyed the literacy conference mainly because I knew they would offer books--at a discount. I am always open to new ways to entice students to learn, too. I visited the Think.Com conference and discovered that I had known Ms. Shumaker for years. She and my neighbor taught in the same district, and I helped my neighbor's daughter prepare assignments for Ms. Shumaker. Shu, as she is known to her students, teaches English, and I modified a couple of Shu's projects for my communication classes.
I wish we could use Think.Com, but I would only use it if it would streamline the process--not add hours to the mountains of papers we have to shuffle now.
I enjoyed the literacy conference a great deal.
Although a lot of the information was above what my students can do, I got some really neat ideas. The "Learning is Social" presentation was geared toward Primary teachers, however, it was very neat and something that I feel is possible with my students. These teachers had worked with their students and had set up a system in which they sat together and the students shared their writing and reading. The other students interacted with eachother well and seemed very comfortable in the classroom. They actively told eachother what they did and didn't like about their writing and what they thought they should do/change to make their writing better. It was very neat to see the videos they showed of the students and how at such a young age and low grade level that they could work with eachother and give eachother suggestions.
I learned a great deal and think this would be neat to do with my students.
Winter Literacy Conference
January 20, 2007
I learned some very useful information at the Winter Literacy Conference. The first session I attended was “Making the Connections Real”. It was interesting to see how Rebekah Ready was able to fit SSR, grammar, vocabulary, literacy teams, reading strategies and much more in a single lesson. My favorite session was the round table discussion group sharing their literacy strategies they had learned this year with examples of how these strategies were applied in their subject areas.
The Good, The Nice, and The Bad
Session 1
Ms Tudor discussed several ways to assist student with building their vocabulary.
One example was to assist students with breaking away from the over-used words (dead words) and using more descriptive words. She provided a list of Dead Words listed vs better-interesting words. Examples would include the following:
Also too, moreover, in addition to
Awesome/cool wonderful, marvelous, fantastic
Like such as, similarly, similar to
Good excellent, great, superb
I displayed this list in my classroom. It really came in handy and the students used it frequently. We are all guilty of using words that are comfortable like “good”. It really helps to have a list of other words to choose.
Second, Ms Tudor discussed using the cloze passage activities. She suggested taking every fifth word from a short passage and then replacing the word with a blank line. “Students are asked to read the cloze passage and fill in the missing words based on what they feel makes sense using context clues.” It requires the student to use their background knowledge to find the missing words.
Finally, the author discussed using photographs to assist students with decoding, evaluating, and responding to photographic images. “A picture is seed attempting to become an oak.” Using photographs in a lesson can assist students with using visual literacy. A few of the questions and activities that could be used with the students are:
General questions:
Who or what do you see?
What is happening in the photograph?
Ways to use photographs are:
Use photographs to build background knowledge and activate schema.
Use photographs paired with a printed text to make comparison or connections.
Questions about the photographer’s intentions:
Why did the photographer select these particular elements to include in the photograph? What don’t you see?
Why did the photographer take the picture from this angle? What might the scene have looked like from another vantage point-from left, right, behind, above or below?
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