Dublin

Mandy and I were excited to have the opportunity to share some things that are going on in own classrooms at the Dublin Literacy Conference in Dublin, OH. "Literacy Stations in Middle Grades" was not only fun to create & present, but it was also encouraging to hear such positive responses from the participants. During this session, we shared how literacy stations run in our classrooms with our students. We were able to share sample stations, ideas for managing the stations, and correlation with curriculum standards.
We both use workstations in our classrooms. We believe strongly in them and their ability to provide students with additional independent practice with skills and strategies, provide time for reading/writing conferences, and provide opportunites to work with small groups. Inspired by Debbie Diller's, Practice with Purpose, we used the interests and needs of our students to develop additional stations to our classrooms.

COMIC STATION: gives students an oppotunity to explore another genre for reading and writing. Students can create their own comic online, read graphic novels, use inferring skills to make meaning of comics, or locate comics in newspapers. Many curriculum standards can be addressed using the activities in this station.
FAIRY TALE STATION: gives students an opportunity to explore a fun genre on a regular basis. Students can compare and contrast fractured fairy tales, write their own fairy tale, write a poem about a charater or theme, or create a wanted posted for one of the villians in their favorite tale. We toted several examples from one of our favorite collections to offer examples of books and activities in this station.
BOOK MAKING STATION: allows students another format for publishing their writing. Several online sites describe different styles of bookmaking that students can choose. One great site can be viewed at the following link: book making. We shared examples of supplies included in our book making stations, as well as, examples of student work.
TRAVEL STATION: allows students to explore different areas of interest in the world. This is a favorite! In this station, students can plan a trip, learn about a new place, explore atlases/maps, or use math skills by choosing items from restaurant menus. The best thing about creating this station is that 99% of the items in this station can be gathered for free! Take-out menus, brochures from welcome centers, maps, informational articles from museums/national parks, etc.

We were able to soak in an almost overwhelming amount of information in other sessions we attended yesterday! We are still letting it all soak in & are working on sharing that information. The conference was amazing! Thanks for all the hard work from the organizers and fellow presenters! We are already looking forward to next year.

Dublin Conference

We love road trips and visiting new places...so Mandy and Cheryl are very excited about the Dublin Literacy Conference (which you can read more about here and here) on February 26! Not only do we get to meet favorite hero authors and illustrators like Wendy Mass, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Brian Pinkney, and Kelly Gallagher, but we get the honor of sharing some things we are doing in our classrooms...just around the corner! We are always looking for innovative teaching strategies to share with our students and can't wait to visit Ohio!

During our presentation we will be sharing a few of the workstations that we incorporate into our middle school language arts classrooms: travel, comics, fairy tale, and bookmaking. These are stations we've developed based on our personal interests and the interests of our students. These are some of their favorite stations to visit and we're looking forward to sharing these bits of our classrooms with everyone. We will be bringing student samples, photographs, & portable stations. We look forward to seeing everyone there!