From rural Wisconsin to wherever you are, we can choose authentic texts that offer both a mirror and a window to our students and their experiences of place. In the resort town of Elkhart Lake, teachers read A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid and connected the tourism industry there to students’ experiences. Attendees will explore resources and ideas to create a similar unit or lesson for their classes.
Blog Archives
Sharing the Reader’s Journey: Facilitating Book Club Podcasts
As choice reading continues to ensure that students of all abilities find enjoyment in reading, teachers incorporating choice reading into their curricula may seek ways to encourage student voice in discussions. This presentation will offer an idea to be applied for ongoing book club units or end-of-semester assessment. Students reading choice books trace their personal reactions to their reading to determine theme or genre-based connections with peer readers. They then apply podcast knowledge gained through class listening experiences to construct and record discussions of their reading journeys using the podcasting app Anchor.
How to SEL-ebrate Learning: Incorporating CASEL-5 Framework into ELA Content Instruction
During this session, teachers will learn how to combine SEL behaviors and ELA curriculum. We will explore ways to take an SEL framework and use it as a lens for analyzing literature.
Culminating Activities to Provide Connections
Traditionally, students have demonstrated their understanding and analysis of a text or topic through tests and essays. However, have you seen other teachers’ social media posts about One Pagers or Hexagons and weren’t sure how to introduce them to students? Hexagons and One Pagers can be used for single texts, to connect multiple texts. to explore themes, and across the curriculum. This presentation will share the basics of each activity and then give participants time to practice each one.
From Voices on Paper to Voices in the Room
Get every student in your class writing and talking about complex, creative, personal and debatable topics. How? Transition from engaging journal prompts to various discourse strategies. Observe the positive difference these activities make in your classroom community and in their extended writing projects. Learn and practice these ideas in an interactive workshop and be inspired!