Today was Day 1 of the TCRWP August Reading Institute that I am blessed to attend. Above is a picture of all the things I got at check in (minus Stargirl the YA book I am reading right now).
Here are the highlights of my day:
We began the day with a keynote by Lucy Calkins at the beautiful Riverside Church (pictured above). She informed us that we were among 1,200 colleagues from 22 countries and 34 states. She challenged us to be public learners and to call others (Olly, Olly, Oxen Free!) to join us in our learning.
My first session is titled: Interpretation Book Clubs: From Close Reading to Higher Level Questioning (4-8). We defined Interpretation as being able to explain the meaning of something through studying concepts, symbols, or actions. We were grouped into Book Clubs for the week. My club is reading White Fur Flying by Patricia MacLachlan. We decided to read the first four chapters tonight for homework and published this goal on our class poster (see above).
My second session is titled: Coming Backstage to Understand the Principals, Methods, and Progressions that Undergird the New K-5 Reading Series. In this session we began by comparing and contrasting the writing and reading units of study. We then discussed the contents of the K-2 kits. Above is a picture from a first grade lesson minilesson where kids were asked to write down the lesson of a book on fortune cookie papers. My homework tonight is to read an entire unit and be prepared to teach a minilesson to my group.
The final session I went to was titled: How Can I Get My Kids to Do More Than “Just Read”? This session was jammed with ideas that centered around these three thoughts:
- Reading Lives Matter
- K.I.S.S. – Keep It Social Silly
- Writing about reading is a means not an end
I will expand on the above ideas in another posting. What I really took away from this session is understanding the difference between Independence and Self-Direction. When we are independent at a task we can do it by ourselves but we might not be getting better at the task. When we are self-directed we have a focus and a goal for our work which helps us get better. We want our readers to be self-directed!
Speaking of self-directed…time to start my homework!
Stop & Jot 