The Sunrise Story

English Workshop Toolkit  Summer Camp 2014 Today we finished camp. The four days brought us together. We created a community and that is precious to me. Thank you to each of the campers/participants. YOU made camp what it was! Your expertise. Your knowledge. Your curiosity. Your openness. Your joy made camp an experience to remember!  Thank you to Michele Schmidt-Moore. Her leadership inspires us all. Each of the presenters spent valuable time preparing and presenting. We are better for learning from you. And Niki, the ultimate camp counselor, teacher and friend!  Niki began our time together with a creative and fun team building activity. Table groups worked together to create a quote that describes the time they spent here this week. (Niki uses this in class for theme as well.) Groups worked closely to create funny, interesting and touching quotes.  Our last time sharing beautiful words...inspired by the art of Andres Amadour. We watched this vid...

English Workshop Toolkit  Summer Camp 2014 Camp continues to get better each day! I'm afraid this post will be shorter (with no pictures today...so much to do and so little time).  We started today with two truths and a lie. I learned that one teacher played with Amy Carter in the White House when she was little and another teacher just finished a half marathon. That game is always interesting. Once again we wrote beautiful words, inspired by Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Famous".  At the end of each the day, the sharing of our beautiful words has resulted in beautiful tears. The writers we have astound and impress me.  The morning was spent learning about strategy groups and conferencing. Laura Tucker presented today and challenged our thinking. It was good. It was that kind of learning that makes us uncomfortable...so uncomfortable that we know we need to change something. The teachers leapt at the chance to learn how to conference more effectively an...

English Workshop Toolkit  Summer Camp 2014 A rainbow is a great start to the day! Day two of camp was about notebooks. I love getting there early and setting up before everyone arrives... Ooohh, PENS!!! Rebecca is so excited about her new pens! Our tables with sandboxes in the middle. Catching up before the day starts. Good morning! We started with a hilarious version of rock, paper, scissors. Here are some pictures of people really getting into the game... This group of teachers takes risks! They leap into whatever we ask with everything they have...they inspire me. After our getting to know you game, we opened our notebooks, ready to write beautiful words. We read a poem by Nikki Grimes about summer and decided to compose in the humid summer air... The humidity didn't dampen our writing. We wrote and remembered how powerful it is to change your perspective.  Then we dove into notebooks. Niki...

English Workshop Toolkit  Summer Camp 2014 Today we had our first day of camp.  Figuring out technology for camp. What is camp? It's a combination of curriculum development, planning, collaboration, and lots of fun! Each day starts off with getting to know you activity and it's followed by beautiful words.  We listened to "Shake the Dust" by Anis Mojgani and used that as inspiration to write. I tweeted about it and LOOK: He favorited my tweet! Yipppeee! We will write and read, just like our students, to help us find the most effective tools to add to our toolkit!  Each of the four days has a focus and today's focus was Interactive Read Aloud. Colleen Milligan and Bea Neukirk shared their experience and expertise in utilizing read aloud instructionally. They modeled with short story, picture book, and excerpt from a longer text. Once the teachers observed them, they were off creating their own plans to incorporate interactive rea...

Slice of Life Challenge Please join the challenge over at  Two Writing Teachers ! Today I start camp. Yes, I said camp. Four days of laughing and learning together. I am a counselor. We've been planning this for weeks and it all starts today! Camp is the theme for our four days of curriculum development for middle school English.  Twenty five teachers will gather together for four days of planning, collaborating, questioning, writing, reading and learning. Each day is lead by amazing teachers in the county who are experts at their task!  I am the constant...the counselor. I begin and end each day with activities to get the participants to open up, have fun, and reflect! We are going to share Beautiful Words everyday. Teachers will write and share their writing. The inspiration for our writing today will be an uplifting and powerful poem from Anis Mojgani called Shake the Dust. Here's my introduction to Beautiful Words...Take his ...