Literacy Training

Hi Everyone!

I feel very grateful this morning because we have power at our house again! After over 60 chilly, dark hours with nothing, everything has been restored, including me :). Anyhow, yesterday my co-op and I attended the "Literacy Design Collaborative" at the IU13. It was the first of four workshop days (they are spread out across the school year and I get to attend all of them!) that brings together teachers from all over Lancaster county to talk about the Common Core Standards and how the literacy design tools can be used to implement the standards. I can't even tell you how exciting it was to sit in a room full of teachers and to see them engaging with the process; everyone was so curious about the new tools and really interested in improving their students' literacy skills.

I can't fully explain the LDC tools to everyone yet, but our next session is on Monday and I am hoping that by next week I will be able to share what I am learning with everyone. The IU13 gave everyone a huge binder with resources and templates for lesson planning; a lot of the strategies look very similar to UbD, but there is actually a method to easily build differentiation into every writing prompt- pretty cool! As part of the workshop requirements, my co-op and I are working on a collaborative writing "task" (its called a task instead of an assessment) to use for our unit on Catcher in the Rye, and after we are finished it is going to be part of a statewide effort to add more LDC lessons to the SAS portal.

Although I missed being in the classroom yesterday, it was also really nice to get to spend time with other professionals and to learn about the newest trend in lesson planning and literacy improvement efforts.