 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Breakout Sessions
Friday Morning |
|
| 1. |  “Literacy in the Morning” Grades K-3 Tiffany Houghtaling, Willard Central Elementary, Willard R-II School District Join Tiffany as she takes you through the instruction and management of a typical morning in a primary classroom. From community building and morning message, through readers' and writers' workshop, she will guide you through the management of comprehensive literacy, inlcuding the trickiness of conducting ongoing assessments. This session answers the question, “What are the other kids doing while we are doing this?” plus the how-tos of easy transitions. |
| 2. | “Writing Around the World” Grades K-2 Cristina Heet and Kena Forbis, Hallsville Primary, Hallsville R-IV School District Prova una delle nostre pasticcerie casalinge? Do you know what this phrase means? Kena and Cristina have taken their classes on a worldly adventure through Italy and Mexico. Through their experiences, students have walked away with knowledge of the countries through writing, reading, and independent inquiry. During this presentaiton, you will learn how Cristina and Kena have given students in kindergarten and first grade the opportunity to explore their writing abilities through inquiry into another culture. Come and see how you can do the same for your students. |
| 3. |  “Keeping a Writer's Notebook in Grades 3-5: Sustaining the Use of This Essential Tool” Grades 3-5 Kiara Lackey, Wren Hollow Elementary, Parkway C-2 School District Bring your writer's notebook and favorite pen! This session will arm you with numerous strategies for your intermediate writers—strategies for purposeful notebook use across many units of study, an entire year, and if you're lucky, a lifetime! This session presumes a solid foundation of workshop teaching where students are engaged daily in the work of a writer: living with their eyes wide open to writing possibilities, choosing personally meaningful topics, and publishing authentic writing that mirrors what they read in the world. As a participant, you will be writing and practicing strategies on your own, sharing their learning with others, and exploring the thoughtful placement of these strategies into the larger context of our year-long teaching. |
| 4. | “Developing Higher Order Literacy Skills with Systems Thinking Tools” Grades 3-8 Tara Nattrass, Ritenour School District How can we take our students to deeper levels of thinking when pre-writing and drafting during writing workshop and when composing reading responses during reading workshop? How do we help our students articulate connections between literacy elements? Bringing systems thinking into the classroom provides teachers and students the opportunity to use additional tools and thought processes to deepen their understanding of literacy standards. These tools provide students with visual representations of patterns, trends, and relationships. Learn how to use behavior over time graphs with students to deconstruct text, explore interrelationships, engage in character analysis, pre-write, and apply knowledge to real world situations. In this session, you will delve into texts and work together with the presenters and each other to create behavior over time graphs. Tara will also provide student work samples to review and analyze. |
| 5. |  “Stretching Each Writer”Grades K-8 Kristen Painter, Educational Consultant If we believe we are teaching writers—not pieces of writing—then our writing conferences must not only open possibilities but also have lasting impact. We must ensure that the teaching in a conference pushes a writer forward. In this session, you will examine the structure of a conference as well as tips for how to decide what to teach during the conference. Additionally, some time will be spent on effectively taking notes about the conferences as well as organizing those notes. |
| 6. | “Their World, Their Words: Building a Student-Driven Writing Center” Grades 7-12 Mary Beth Calkin, Dana Courter, and Rachel Lechner, Branson High School, Branson R-IV School District The setting is sublime: a peer workshop where students offer constructive advice to fellow writers who, in turn, accept that criticism and rewrite accordingly. And then you wake up and realize you have thirty students, fifteen who are not sure how to critique (at least not constructively), ten who are not finished, and five who don't know where to begin. How do we help our students become cognizant of their own writing processes and bring their words to the world? Using a student-driven writing center, we teach them to help each other. In this interactive workshop, you will see how trained student coaches guide their peers through the writing process to ownership of their own words. You will also take away ideas for starting a writing center in your own school district. |
| 7. |  “Play's the Thing” Grades 8-12 Rebecca Dierking, University of Missouri Drawing upon the work of Augusto Boal’s social justice theatre, Rebecca will direct this interactive workshop in which you will experience how play and play acting can benefit students both academically and personally. Using play allows students to embody text to self or text to world connections for a time, gaining new perspectives and reaching understanding within themselves. Warning: you will be out of your seat; come dressed to play! |
| 8. | “Creative Engagement and Higher Order Thinking Skills”
Grades 8-12 Mary Kim Shreck, Educational Consultant More and more of the learners populating our classrooms are equipped with a strongly visual learning style. In this presentation, Mary Kim will present a creative way to tap into that dominant learning style and will demonstrate how students can recognize and use higher order thinking skills. Using the creative approach of substituting a picture for text, Mary Kim will demonstrate how to teach, discuss, and familiarize any group of students with their own ability to access their brain's natural inclination toward higher order thinking. This will be an interactive session. |
| 9. | “It's NOT Just for Grading Anymore: the Teachable Rubric”
Grades 9-12 Jessica Brookman, Raymore-Peculiar High School, Raymore-Peculiar R-II School District Do your students, when their papers are returned to them, just glance at the score and the comments you make, or do they pour over your rubric to find the “errors of their ways”? Is the rubric that you use designed to justify a score given on a writing assignment, or is it so vague and generalized that you spend more time searching the rubric than reading the paper? Does your district require you to use a generic 6-traits writing rubric that is supposed to cover everything? Rubrics could be one of the strongest teaching tools we have for writing improvement if we align them to the assignment expectations and then use them as a barometer to aid our students to self-teach when they get their papers back. In this session, you will examine common writing rubric mistakes and develop ways to make using them both easier on the teacher and invaluable to students. |
| 10. | “Teen to Text; Text to Teen: Let the Gateway Readers Award Connect You to the World of Young Adult Lit.”
Grades 9-12 Jenni George, Ft. Zumwalt South High School Let the Gateway Readers Award connect you to the world of great young adult literature. Each year, the Missouri Association of School Librarians scours the shelves to find the top fifteen books published for teen readers. Come to this workshop to learn about the Gateway Readers Award and the nominees for 2010-2011 and to gather ideas on how you might incorporate more teen literature and the Gateway Reader nominees into your classroom. From independent novel units and lit. circles to starting your own book club, from using “book looks” to help students select their own reading to using podcasting and book talks to ignite excitement about reading, the Gateway books can help your students connect to the world of good reads. |
| 11. | “Collaboration Through Technology: Online Learning for Students and Teachers”
Grades 9-12 K'Lea Snyder and Lynn Laipple, Benton High School, St. Joseph School District One of the things new teachers struggle with is finding time to collaborate. When Benton High School began to pilot technology in the classroom, we found a solution to the collaboration crisis that works for us. Becoming comfortable with online collaboration helped us to make our lessons and assessments better. When we, as teachers, became more comfortable with working together online, we began to implement this same type of online collaboration in our classrooms. Online learning boosted student engagement and desire to actively participate in reading and writing conferences. Soon, these practices spread into every classroom. Teachers and students are now using blogs, wikis, nings, Google apps, and Twitter to collaborate in and outside of the classroom. Come learn how you can do it, too! |
| 12. | “Teaching the Social Skills of Small Group Interaction”
Grades K-12 Harvey “Smokey” Daniels, Author and Educational Consultant In recent years, we have gotten very good at teaching comprehension strategies explicitly across grade levels. But then we put kids into groups to work, and they often go off task and off the topic. Why? Because we have not explicitly taught the repertoire of social strategies kids need to work effectively in collaborative groups. In this session, Smokey will show you how to teach and maintain the seven social strategies kids need to work together successfully. |
Friday Morning Sessions |
Friday Afternoon Sessions |
Saturday Morning Sessions |