Learning Opportunities

This session has been completed.

Summer Literacy Institute Kindergarten to Grade 2

Presented By

Beth Hickey, Adrienne Gear, Darren Victory, Peter Bowers, Carla Thio, Miranda Krogstad

Series Sessions

Date Time
Aug 23, 20238:15 am to 3:30 pm
Aug 24, 20238:15 am to 3:30 pm
Aug 25, 20238:15 am to 3:30 pm

Location

Sherwood Park (Heritage Hills Elementary School)
280 Heritage Drive
Google Map

Grade Levels

Kindergarten - Grade 2

Beth Hickey with Teacher’s College Reading Writing Project 

This workshop will focus on teaching writing using a workshop approach. You will learn the philosophy behind writing workshop and how that philosophy impacts the structures and routines of a workshop classroom, including interactive writing, shared writing, and talk time. You will think through the writing process and the different ways the writing process supports students with the qualities of good writing. You will explore formal and informal ways to assess student writing and use your learning to plan for future instruction. Informational writing and narrative writing will be
centered in our conversations. Across the workshop, Beth will share the project’s learning that informed the revisions to the new writing units of study as well as the newest thinking about writing partners and small groups.

A Powerful Year of Writing Webinar with Adrienne Gear

We are excited to have BC educator and author Adrienne Gear join us to share ideas from her newest book on teaching writing, “Powerful Writing Structures”. In this session, Adrienne will explore effective ways to develop a responsive writing program in an elementary class, complete with writing goals, practice writes, formative assessment, and brain pocket writing! She will focus on different writing structures students should have experience with throughout the year, including personal narrative, nonfiction (writing in the content areas), and story writing. She will highlight lessons, share student samples, and, as always, highlight some of her favorite writing anchor books! Come to this session and leave inspired to start your new year with LOTS of practical ideas you can start implementing right away!

Darren Victory with Jennifer Serrvallo

Drawing from The Writing Strategies Book and Teaching Writing in Small Groups, this summer learning experience will help you use strategies effectively in your instruction—no matter what approach to literacy you use, or the grade level, developmental levels, or ages of the students you teach. Research has proven that strategy instruction is effective when used to teach a whole class or when used to differentiate instruction for individual students. This particular learning experience will emphasize the use of strategy instruction when differentiating learning for your students.

Participants will learn how to study student writing to determine goals and use skill progressions to identify strategies and track progress. Darren will focus on practical ways to guide student practice through small groups, and how to match methods to purposes as well as explore practical ways to manage differentiation, including notetaking and scheduling.

Structured Word Inquiry: Teaching interrelation of Morphology and grapheme-phoneme correspondences from the beginning with Peter Bowers

This session provides an introduction to Kindergarten to Grade 3 teachers trying to introduce morphology to their literacy instruction as required in the Alberta curriculum, and recommended by research that shows the youngest and less able students gain the most from morphological instruction. That research also shows that morphological instruction benefits phonological outcomes the most - even greater than morphological outcomes. This practical session helps teachers of young children understand why these findings make sense and introduces them to ways they can bring this instruction into their everyday practice.

Empowering Writers with Carla Thio

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN: Age-appropriate instructional tools to effectively teach your students the foundational skills they need to become strong writers. You’ll be introduced to the developmental stages of writing that create a learning progression, cultivate practical strategies to teach your students how to identify genre and author’s purpose, and develop the foundational skills of narrative writing. Through this session, you will gain confidence in your writing instruction and spark the creativity of your young authors.

Rising Writers: A Creative Writing Starter Kit with Miranda Krogstad

How young can writers begin to create literary works? This workshop will give early to mid-elementary writers the foundation that will lead up to the literary devices and techniques they’ll learn later on. As a lead-up to junior high creative writing and beyond, this workshop will review hands-on activities and ideas to get your students dabbling in sensory language, comparisons, defamiliarization, tone, and more.

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