Working on "stuff"!

I'm currently working on a few new things.

Professional Development:

First, I'm working on a professional development program for new teachers moving into CRT work.  I'm personally pretty excited about this one as it's centered around helping new teachers to find their strengths and really shine in their careers!

This comes from the feedback of a number of provisionally registered CRTs who are saying that their university course didn't really prepare them for what they are in for.  It covered some of the areas but but they felt that their lecturers were a little out of touch with what's going on in schools for CRTs and the advice that myself and other Wodonga CRT Support Network members keeps offering them is 1000% more helpful to actually become a confident and capable CRT.

One Book Lesson Plans.

There's currently about 5 more in the works to go along with the "When the wind changed" activity and the "Memory Bottles" lesson plan.

The Giants loo roll is nearest completion and I'm quite happy with this one.  Even the name of the book itself grabs the minds of primary students ;).  It's a great book that lends itself to literacy, some more complicated Math and sums as well as an art exercise.

1 Resource - 40 activities.

Using 1 resource to set a theme, each of these packs will have 40 activities (a somewhat arbitrary number decided upon by the fact that the number 40 appears twice in the name of my TpT store!).

The activities will include as many curriculum areas as I can cram in such as:

• Literacy.
• Maths.
• Geography.
• Science.

A preview will hopefully be available soon!

So lots of stuff being worked on and hopefully I'll be having some of it coming out soon!

Regards,

Mel.

One Book Lesson plans: Reading to engage.

With the curriculum getting more and more packed each year, it gets harder and harder to prioritize what teachers can bring to their classrooms.  Teachers are slowly but surely losing the ability to choose the elements of their Student's education as they have to "pack in" everything they are supposed to teach in an efficient way.  The "extras" are slowly going by the wayside and modern students are missing out on a lot of what we used to get in schools as students.

While Teachers scrabble to educate their students in a way that gets them reading, writing and composing? It's getting harder and harder to find the time to make it a priority to give them a passion for books and a love for reading for the simple enjoyment of it.  I get around this by killing two birds with one stone and using my favourite books to engage with my students as a basis for a lesson rather than using books purely as a teaching aid.

One Book Lesson Plans use reading to your class as an engagement tool which is a little different from reading to settle a class.  Reading to settle a class is about focusing their attention away from playground issues and giving their bodies time to stop giving out all the chemicals that make them jumpy and excited for example (although this isn't the only time when it's a good idea).  Reading to engage is a little different in that it is to grab their attention and get them personally invested in the subject matter to provide self-motivation for the following lesson.

One Book Lesson Plans capitalize on the fact that engagement is a very important tool for CRTs as we need a solid way to overcome the fact that we are an "invader" into the classrooms we work in.  We are an immediate excuse for the students to once again start testing boundaries to see what they can get away with so the tools to overcome this are built into them in an intuitive way.  Keeping students engaged with their work is a very effective method to steer them away from testing those boundaries, they are so busy with something else that it just gives so little time for it to occur to them to try and step over one or two.

To naturally and inherently reduce the difficulties that CRTs face in the classroom every day.

Watch this video on YouTube!

The beautiful part about using books in this way is that they are used for "justifyable educational purposes" when it comes to how other view what you are doing in a classroom.  It also gives you an easier pathway to providing your students with productive learning as well as being a step back in time to when it was also easy to make instilling a love of literacy and books in our students a priority too.

Schools will love it.  You will love it.  Students will love it.  A perfect addition to your "Bag of tricks"!

Regards,

Mel.