My New Team

My team met today for our first grade level meeting. Sometimes grade level meetings can be fun and informative. Others can be rather dreary and akin to extreme root canals. The former is what I experienced today. I am looking forward to working with this dynamic team. 2017-2018 will be a great year. Plus I found a fellow Twitter kindred spirit. The photo that I am posting comes from one of her tweets today. It will be an exhilarating year. You can Tweet that to the bank!

Reading and Writing Institute at Edgewood

I conducted a Reading and Writing Institute at Edgewood this week. We started on Monday and finished on Wednesday. Teachers  from grades 3-5 attended. My colleagues from Edgewood also attended. We worked on understanding expository and narrative text structures from a Reading and Writing perspective.  We wrote about important stories in our lives and explored topics to develop in our writing. We used common objects to be utilized as artifacts to help us trigger memories. These Indelible Moments from Story of My Thinking by Gretchen Bernabei were fun to explore, write and share. We also learned several revision techniques including RADAR, Pitchforking, and Renaming.


We also learned more about the teaching of grammar in relevant and natural ways. We studied Jeff Anderson's work titled Mechanically Inclined and Everyday Editing. We used the sentence constructs from Dr. Joyce Armstrong Carol in Acts of Teaching, and Gretchen Bernabei's work from her book Grammar Keepers. We also study parts of speech using mentor sentences and the Invitations to Edit. In addition to that, we study nouns, verbs, and explored proofs and conversations to help  interiorize language from Grammar Keepers. Finally, we brought it all together in an Express Lane Edit.

Also we studied each other's sentences and kernel essays by sharing continuously with partners and in triads. We vacuumed the residue with the 3, 5, 7 brainstorm and top ten list. Then we studied sentences using Sparkling Sentences. We had some really wonderful peer writing to highlight and analyze. It was a fun filled 3 days of learning. I can't wait to do this again possibly next year!  I do, however, need to get some rest! I am bushed!

Indelible Moments

Sharing a Moment Using The Memory Kernel

Revising Using RADAR and Tracking the Movement of the Mind

Vacuuming the Residue

Sharing Collecting Signatures

From Three to Joining the Triads to Vacuum More of the Residue

Invitation to Collect and Celebrate-Mentor Sentence Share