There are several upcoming literacy opportunities for the end of summer and the beginning of the school year.
JULY BOOK CLUB. Included is a book club this coming Thursday evening from 6:30 to 7:30 CST. Eric Litwin will be there in person to talk about a new professional book he wrote called The Power of Joyful Teaching. I promise you it will be a lively and informative event. His book includes tons of ideas for getting kids of all ages engaged in the reading process. There are lots of specific ideas in the book and lots of free resources on his website. In this second session of the book club, you’ll be hearing about all this from Eric himself. New registrations are welcome. This is a free event open to all. It is sponsored by The Missouri Literacy Association, an affiliate of the International Reading Association. BTW I did a blog about Eric’s new book LINK.
Here is a link to register for that book club:
https://mla31.wildapricot.org/event-4301466
August Book Club. Here is the promo for the Missouri Literacy Association’s August book club event:
Notice we are promoting this as a “Little to NO-PREP Book Club”. It features two different books by Trudy Ludwig. It is free and open to all.
This is a one-session book club. She will be at this session via Zoom to talk about both books. Again, you will come away from this session with great ideas about how to use picture books. It also provides you the perfect chance to learn more about both of these wonderful books Trudy has written.
Special Edition of The Missouri Reader. The last weekend in July, the Missouri Literacy Association will be releasing the latest issue of The Missouri Reader. The Missouri Reader is a peer-reviewed professional journal that has been publishing for over four decades. Glenda Nugent and I are the co-editors of this journal. This special summer edition will look at the many sides of the question of how to best teach reading, especially beginning reading. This issue includes an article by Brian Cambourne and Debra Crouch that proposes replacing the “Reading Wars” metaphor with a “Reading Quilt” metaphor. I wrote a blog about that idea LINK. BTW- we are in the process of lining up a book club around Debra Crouch and Brian Cambourne’s new book Made for Learning. I’ll let you know when we have a date for that.
We will also discuss Nell Duke’s new literacy model and P.D. Pearson’s new book, The History of Literacy Education. I will give a link to the journal. It will be in the blog I’ll be writing about this special issue. That will also come out the last weekend in July. In the meantime, here is a sample to give you an idea of what special editions of our reading journal look like. It is a link to a previous special edition that was about how to use poetry in literacy instruction. It includes powerful ideas for using poetry with both younger and older students. Have a look while you are waiting for the new journal to come out.
I hope all the preceding gives you some low prep, high impact ideas that will help you make the transition from the end of summer to the start of the school year. I hope to see you at some (or all) of the book club sessions, and I hope you will enjoy the many resources that The Missouri Reader will be providing you.
Happy Reading and Writing
Dr. Sam Bommarito, aka the centrist who uses ideas from all sides to inform his teaching
Copyright 2021 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely the view of this author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
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