Blogging Update

It has been awhile since I have blogged and I promised my Blogging Club that I would get much better at holding myself accountable since I would be blogging beside them every week. The problem is we had a snow day, followed by President's Weekend, so I got a little lazy. With that being said, I decided to update our school's website tonight by adding a new page with all of my bloggers new blogs. You can check it out by going to East Coldenham Elementary School; Teachers; Literacy Consultant: Launa Kruithof; EC's Blog Club. I'm excited to see their excitement and enjoyment for blogging! I can't wait for them to post their first post this week and start their second.

Now, my new goal: get back to blogging about my experience in learning Literacy in the K-2 classrooms! So much to tell...maybe tomorrow...😜

Blogging Writing Club

I'm SO excited to announce that I am starting a Blogging Writing Club at my school for 4th and 5th grade students! My Principal came to me asking me if I was interested in starting some sort of writing club at our school. Of course I said I was interested, since I am the Literacy Consultant for the building. However, I knew that I didn't want to do just any ordinary club. I didn't want to do a school newspaper...I thought about a poetry club...maybe an extension off of the school website somehow? No, nothing seemed right. It wasn't until I sat down with our District's Technology Coach, Jim Treloar, that we came up with the idea of creating a club where students would be able to make their own blog!

What would they blog about? ANYTHING is the answer. We are constantly asking students to write for us...but, how much experience have they had sharing their thoughts on an on-line blog? I bet none! Do they even know what a blog is? I want my students to make their blog about what interests them. A place for them to share their thoughts...maybe like an on-line writer's notebook? Now, that would be cool. I can't wait to discover what THEY want to write about and share with the world. My plan is to share with them my blog and what I write about: literacy of course! I'm sure they will figure that out before I even show it to them. 

When we first thought of this idea, Jim asked me, "How many students are you thinking?" I laughed at him and said, "I don't think that many will show, maybe 10? I mean they have to write. You think they really will want to come and write for me? For an hour in the morning, before school?" Boy, was I blown away by the response that we received back from our students. In our small school with only two sections of each grade level, we received 22 responses! TWENTY-TWO! That's a whole class worth! Wow! I just realized I have a blogging class. :) I wasn't expecting that! 

Well, tomorrow is the first day full of introductions and getting them started. I can't wait to get these blogs off the ground and see what they come up with to write about. 

Are you blogging in your class?

Wish us luck! 
xo

Literacy for All

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Lester Laminack's session on flipping reading workshop into writing workshop. This topic is discussed in his new book: Writers ARE Readers. Of course I had to purchase his book and he signed it! I'm getting quite a collection of signed books in my collection. 

If you ever get the opportunity to see and listen to Laminack do it!! He doesn't disappoint. While he makes you think and reflect on your teaching, he also makes you laugh! He should have an act as a comedian. His session did not disappoint and was one of my favorite sessions so far!

I can't wait to read his book and try out some of his lessons in some of my colleagues classrooms.

More to come....

Literacy for All

I'm so excited to attend Literacy for All Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm currently surrounded by hundreds of teachers of literacy. I can't wait to see many of the gurus of literacy present! I'm ready to push my thinking forward. I'm taking the stance of a learner. ALL teachers should always have this stance, once they quit thinking of themselves as learners, we must remove ourselves from the classroom. We must put our best selves in the classroom each day for our students, the future of our world. So, I ask you...what will you be learning more about this week? 

Literacy Centers

Independent Work Management..."centers" or "jobs" in the K-2 classrooms seem to be quite overwhelming for teachers. I have learned that it is very important to take your time introducing centers to your class BEFORE you begin your work with Guided Reading. This will pay off later as far as behavior management and working independently is concerned. Use a Work Board and teach your students the rules and expectations from the beginning. 

Teach one center at a time while being explicit with your teaching. Revisit this center for a few days. Once you are certain your students can control the center independently, add on a new center. Repeat.

It is important that your centers are meaningful and authentic. It's not just busy work. It is meaningful work that supports their learning about literacy. NO WORKSHEETS! They fail you time and time again. Learning skills in isolation does not teach a reader how to read. There are SO many great center ideas in the Fountas and Pinnell Phonics books! Use them to back up the skills that you've already taught. Don't overthink your centers. You can keep many of the same centers just change out the principle for the week. I'm looking forward to incorporating poetry and technology in my centers this year...more to come on that! 

 

What are your favorite centers to use with your students? Some that I think I will start with this year are:

*Independent Reading

*Browsing Boxes

*Read Around the Room

*Listening Center

*Poetey Center

*Magnetic Letters

*Various Phonics Centers

(Start simple...)

Things to Remember:

1.Take your time (go slow to go fast...)

2. Be explicit with your teaching

3. Retech

4. There is nothing too small to teach and revisit

5. Don't teach a new center until you are certain your students can control the previous one(s).

6. Keep them meaningful and authentic. No WORKSHEETS

7. Don't overthink them

Starting again...

This past week, I started my new endeavor to become Dual Certified as a PreK- 6 Literacy Collaborative Coordinator. I already hold my Intermediate Cert focusing in grades 3-6. The intermediate kids are where I've spent the majority of my career through AIS services and LC. I'm quite intimidated by the little ones, but they sure are cute. 

I never thought about working with the little kiddos until this past school year when my district decided that they were going to hire back 2 more coaches, but we would stay in one building (last year I was in all four buildings concentrating in Intermediate). This would mean that each coach would have to go back to Lesley University in Cambride, MA to learn the other half of their specialty. 

Training started this week with 4 jam packed days of intense instruction about literacy in the primary classrooms. I found myself a few times saying not only in my head, but also aloud, "What did I get myself into?!" 

A lot of the time was spent discussing the theory behind LC in primary concentrating on the work of Marie Clay, as well as many others. While the theory is grounded and very similar in both the primary and intermediate settings, there were some big ideas that we needed to dive into to understand the preK-2 world.

We discussed Writing Workshop and spending a lot of time practicing storytelling and making books. This is very new to me, but I'm looking forward to trying it out this year (I will share our work here this year). 

Interactive Writing was a huge undertaking. I've done Shared Writing with my students in the Intermediate setting, but Interactive is a whole new game. While it is powerful for students, teachers must be careful observers and know their students. It is all about the Zone of Proximal Development and nudging students to learn an aspect of writing that as individuals they need to focus on and incorporate in their independent writing. I will post a video on this once I try it out this year.

More about this last week to come....

Any thoughts on Interactive Writing or Writers' Workshop? 

Writing Professional Development 2015

During this past month, I travelled to each of my four elementary schools offering 3 hour professional development workshops to my Intermediate teachers on writing. When I surveyed the teachers, they all said they would appreciate PD on writing, but they weren't very specific. That's a HUGE subject. Where should I take them? Where should I begin? Last year we discussed the 6 + 1 Traits (see previous post). I knew that I would have to revisit that topic as it was just an overview and I don't think teachers were feeling very confident in that area. So my colleague, the Primary Coordinator, and I started researching and decided we would focus on the implementation and launch of the traits in writing workshop. 

Visit the links below for more information on the 6 + 1 Traits of Writing. 

http://www.smekenseducation.com/

http://www.culhamwriting.com/mainstreet.html

Grammar instruction has been a bone of contention for many teachers. I have been on a quest the past few years trying to figure out the best way to incorporate grammar into the classroom. I have read and learned a lot from the work of Jeff Anderson, the Write Guy. He has written many books, such as Mechanically Inclined and Everyday Editing. However, it wasn't until I saw him at Literacy for All Conference this past November in Providence, RI, that I felt as though I could bring his work to my colleagues. He encourages teachers to show students mentor sentences from real authors and discuss what they notice. It's all about function and application. Students learn why grammar works, how to use it, and apply it to their own writing to reinforce the skill. This would be part two of my training. 

The final aspect of my training would focus on Writing about Reading in reading workshop. I've noticed that often students primarily summarize the book that they are reading and don't share their thoughts about what they've read. I've wondered, why is this? Well...we say share your thinking, but what does that really mean? Students need concrete examples and they need them modeled. Another colleague of mine and former LC shared another great resource, Readers Writing by Elizabeth Hale. In this text she offers 91 different strategies to teach students how to respond using different sentence stems that promote different types of thinking that target specific comprehension skills. 

You can purchase both Anderson and Hale's work on Stenhouse! 

What are you looking to learn more about in writing workshop?