Attention all novice and frazzled teachers! Help is here in simplifying everyday tasks and routines. Establish positive parent rapport, get student behavior under control, enhance your classroom atmosphere, and control the paper load. Actual letters home and behavior plan will be provided.

When students decode fluently, it does not mean they comprehend what they have read. This course teaches actual strategies to successfully deal with narrative as well as factual text. Visualization practices by Linda-Mood Bell and guided reading practices will be explored. Participants will participate in each activity to ensure understanding and retention.

An understanding of story elements is key to the comprehension of narrative text. If students do not see the Gestalt of the story, they are merely reading words. The predictability and familiarity of folk literature lends itself to easily being mapped. Noodle Head Tales, Cumulative Tales. Wonder Tales, Myths, Legends, Fables, Porquoi Tales, and others lend themselves to having straight forward antagonists, protagonists, setting, etc. Children enjoy these stories immensely.

Since 1993, I have been involved in staff development that focused on alternative phonics and spelling strategies. On several occasions teachers voiced concern that they did not feel secure teaching these subjects. Their college reading courses were limited to theory and the approach at that time. Today’s districts are faced with educating children requiring phonics instruction often in alternative formats. My motto has always been, “If you don’t know it, you can’t teach it.” For example, if you do not know the three sounds of Y and their connection to their placement in a syllable or word, your students won’t either. This course will include consonant sounds, vowel sounds, blends, digraphs, phoneme irregularities, syllable types, and division patterns for multisyllabic words. Since encoding is so closely related to decoding, spelling rules and generalities will be concurrently addressed. Some suggestions regarding effective remedial reading and spelling programs will also be discussed. Knowledge is empowering for experienced, as well as novice, teachers.

Recent brain research has revealed that the teacher-dominated lecture and test model of instruction is not compatible with how the brain acquires and retains information. Learning can be enhanced by incorporating any number of brain-friendly strategies proposed by experts such as Eric Jensen and Dr. David Sousa. Although a mini-course on the brain is provided, the majority of the time will be spent on ideas and practices that promote learning. Come armed with your driest lesson, and you will be ready to redesign it by the end of the presentation. Experience how freeing it can be to maximize learning through utilizing sound, brain-based recommendations for creating the optimal learning environment. You just might find change enjoyable!

This workshop will be invaluable to both novice and veteran teachers. Today’s students must prove their ability to express themselves in an organized and literate fashion. With a shift in emphasis from narrative writing to expository and persuasive writing, this is a skill that students will need to become effective communicators in their secondary school careers and throughout their lives. Graphic organizers, sample lessons, and direct teaching prompts will be provided for the following types of essays: Steps in a Process, Cause and Effect, Problem/Solution, Compare and Contrast, and Persuasive. Ideas will be provided for fostering self-revision in a manner that students will be able to embrace. In addition, the instructor will share and model specific methods to “spice up” technically correct, but dry writing.