VES Professional Reading Group's blog

At our first VES Professional Reading Group 2009-2010 meeting we covered a great deal in a very short period of time. 

The main highlights of our first meeting studying Units of Study were:

• Covering the lessons the first time around seems to take much longer than expected
• We decided we needed to create a mentor text list per grade level. Please Check this out:and THANK YOU Seattle!

http://www.eledblog.com/content/writers-workshop-book-lists-units-and-comprehension-strategies#comment-190

This article appeared in the Sunday 08/30/09 NY Times.

This article is mostly about one teacher's application of writing workshop a la Nancy Atwell's In The Middle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/30reading.html?_r=2&em

I was fortunate enough to hear Nancy Atwell speak in like 1991 at a Capital Region Reading Association Conference at the Desmond Americana. She had really long hair then and she was all Portlandy and cool. I loved her descriptions of her students' writing development during her writing workshop.

While driving back to Guilderland HS on the bluest, sunniest, most glorious summer day you could imagine, I was seriously questioning my good judgment.  We don’t get many of these days here in the Albany NY area.  I enjoyed my time at the Reading Institute but the Writing Institute had to be even better to pass the test for me.  I get squirmy thinking about sunshine and blue skies if I am not completely enraptured with what I am experiencing.  Three days of squirming would have been unfortunate at best.

I read the first seven pages of Launching the Writing Workshop from Units of Study for Teaching Writing Grades 3-5 by Lucy Calkins and Cory Gillette.  To help me process the information I made a list. Writing a list of techniques to use to gather ideas in the writer’s notebook seemed like a good idea but I have been given lists of “techniques to gather ideas in writing notebooks,” and used them in the past.

I looked forward to scooping up some new ideas at the Annual Summer Reading Institute.  I got lucky and when I got there I found my favorite colleagues- Sara, Tammy, MaryBeth and Tim.  In June, I signed up to hear Richard Allington speak about RTI, enjoy the 8:00 AM BOCES coffee & breakfast, catch up with my colleagues and maybe pick up a book or two from the vendors, especially Baum & Beaulieu because I have those green coupons they gave me to use up.