Lucy Calkins Conference
INTRODUCTION
During the Fall of 2015, I was granted the opportunity to see Lucy Calkins present her Units of Study for Teaching Reading. This conference was wonderful for many reasons. First, I was able to see Lucy herself present; she is a woman who is passionate about literacy, and is wildly intelligent and well spoken. This artifact contains my notes of this Milwaukee conference.
STANDARDS
WI Teacher Standards:
Standard 10: Teachers are connected with other teachers and the community.
IRA Standards:
IRA Standard 2: Candidates use instructional approaches, materials, and an integrated, comprehensive, balanced curriculum to support student learning in reading and writing.
IRA Standard 6: Candidates recognize the importance of, demonstrate, and facilitate professional learning and leadership as a career-long effort and responsibility.
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REFLECTION
I left the Lucy Calkins conference feeling excited to get back into my own classroom! One of the biggest things that Lucy stressed to teachers at her conference is that if we want kids to be better readers we as educators need to provide them with time to READ! I felt reassured by Lucy that I am doing the correct thing in letting my kids have a large chunk of their day spent reading. I had questioned myself earlier this year, though, as I was worried my students were not writing about their reading enough. Lucy again reassured me on this topic; she stated that although it is good for students to document their thinking, she believes students should be making more than basic reading connections. Lucy also stressed to have students make a reading log for school, which I found to be an interesting idea. My students already track their minutes read at home, but I felt the idea of a school reading log was something new! Lucy suggested students track their start and end reading time, their pages read, what book they are reading, and the book's genre. One final take away I had from my conference is the idea of Book Clubs. Lucy heavily suggested Book Clubs, as she believes book clubs allow students to have choice of the text they are reading. Book Clubs also allow students to have rich conversations about literature.
