Day 2-It Just Keeps Getting Better!!

This morning, our keynote speaker was Dr. Math. Close your eyes and picture your grandmother at age 74!! This woman is one fine, sassy role model for all teachers of math!! She tells it like it is and is passionate about teaching math so that kids get what they are doing!! She showed us so many examples of how math was 50 years ago; and then showed that we are still teaching many things in the same manner!! How could our students not love math and get it, if only we taught it the way she modeled? We then had our morning session with Dr. Renzulli and his wife Sally. We looked at how to bring in different levels of lessons that will hook our students interests and lead them into deeper investigations if that is where their interests, questions, etc take them. Teresa and I were able to attend Day 2 of SEM-R (School Enrichment Model) Reading, this afternoon. Today's focus was about Book Hooks. Taking just a few minutes to share great literature with students and sharing the love of reading!! During this time you might be sharing a reading strategy such as visualizing or teaching how to decide if a book is a good choice for you. We looked at great picture books and shared with our classmates on how to extend and enrich our lessons by guiding students to see connections in many ways. What do we do if we only have 1 copy of a book, how can we guide them to other areas? Perhaps, through other books with the same type of characters, or the author's writing style or theme... Bookmaking was our next class, where today we finished our Gypsy Bag book, made a wallet book, hand stiched a book (I'm seeing this one in our pioneer study :) ), and the spine covered book. Students can make all of these books and use them in a variety of ways!! We quickly took a walk in the rain on our way back to the room and got ready for dinner. We then headed off to hear Dr. Gentry. She gave a book talk about Clusters in the School. I sat there and kept saying, "Yes, yes, yes;" and shaking my head in agreement the whole time!! As you can tell, I am so pumped about what we are learning this week!! Hopefully, all of our staff, will be able to experience Confratute for themselves at some point!! I am so honored to be a part of this team and so excited to share with everyone when we get home!!