TCRWP August Reading Institute

DAY #1: Lucy’s Keynote
a 2-kleenex speech for me. Here are some of the quotes I jotted down as I listened:

“We come from 23 countries, 36 states, all 5 boroughs…1,300 participants.”

“This institute is NOT an event. It is a community.”

“What do you need to do to build your RWP back home?”

“The challenges of today are huge (and then Lucy listed problem-after-depressing problem facing our world). With all these challenges, we need to get to work.”

“For years at the project, the focus has been on the curriculum. But we realize we also need to focus on the values of the community. Why? Because when we feel safe in a community, we can do the hard work and grow.”

“Learning to read IS scary. My classroom needs to be a safe place to read – a nest, a kind community.”

“In my classroom, I am the CEO. What will be my motto? What will be my traditions?”

“Invite kids to co-author the classroom so it is the best it can be.”

“Books can build the reader we want to become – books like 100 Dresses, Each Kindness and Raymie Nightingale.”

“On the first day of school, a staff developer read The Big Orange Splot and had kids record their dreams. Then asked ” How will this school be different because you are a part of it?”

“Resume VS Obituary  –> schools teach toward resume building; Instead, we need to live the stories we’d be proud to be written about in our obituary”

Kleenex Story #1: Her description of her 90+ year old parents. “When mom doesn’t want to do the stairs, she will sleep in the day bed. Dad doesn’t want to be far away, so he will lounge in the nearby chair. But he can’t hear too well so he fashions a rope using the dog leashes and they each hold an end.”

Kleenex Story #2: An older man who helped the Project got sick and was in the hospital. Lucy stopped to visit him. Not sure what she could do, she offered to get him a radio as he always played classical music from a radio when at work. “I’d like a little Beethoven,” he replied from his hospital bed. “But then I left and went to work and I got busy. Weeks later we got the call he had died. And all I could think of was how I never got him that radio. As I pass the hospital now, I see it only as a radio.”

Last line of her speech – “May we not forget the radio.”

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NOTE: I am in a Small Group with Kelly Boland learning about how to use the Pathway Learning Progressions while reading fiction

AND

I am in a Small Group with Kate Roberts learning about close reading while reading non-fiction

MORE NOTES ON THIS TO COME!