The presenters will define the Socratic seminar and the use of a reading journal as a companion to seminar as well as describe what seminars and journals look like in their classrooms. Handouts will give examples of student work and ideas for teaching and assessing seminars and journals.
There's a heightened focus on students’ ability to interact with complex texts and make connections across genres. This session will help teachers learn to build multi-genre text sets around a common theme or attribute at different levels of readiness in order to help students reach higher level thinking during reading.
The presenters will share several unique ways school literacy specialists might effectively support their teachers. Avenues explored will include publishing and presenting, disciplinary literacy, quality children's literature, social media, and assessment.
Read poetry? Maybe. Write poetry? You have got to be kidding! Come see how reluctant and sometimes struggling readers and writers discover poetry. English Language Learners dive into poetry with the teacher as poet. Soon students feel empowered to write their own poetry. Student and presenter samples will be provided. Read, write and analyze poetry with teacher and student poems.
Short answer response requires close reading to make critical decisions about complexities and relationships in multiple genres of texts. This session will show how visual support and critical conversations are used for close reading and recursive writing processes to annotate, plan, draft, and revise responses.
A selection of picture books, young adult novels, short stories, and poems forms the basis for literacy experiences designed to help teachers and students build empathy. Participants will receive an annotated list of texts and curricular ideas to use in “building confidence, courage, courtesy, compassion, and competence.
In this session, learn new ways to use a creative listing strategy known as the Quick List to engage students in literature response and in both narrative and expository writing. Give your students the COURAGE to write and write well with a focused purpose and audience.
