Dear Cami, I attended Brian Camboure's Sunday reading institute at the IRA conference in Atlanta. Cambourne presented, along with classroom teachers. Cambourne is the author of the Conditions for all (human) learning, which I think is really reflected in Routman's optimal learning model, and even have components within the reading/writing workshops framework.
The kindergarten teacher (I think she was from Kentucky, but my notes are in the car) who presented with Cambourne shared how her year is built around creating, reading, writing, performing, watching, advertising Reader's Theatre performances. Every time she read a new book aloud to her class the students wanted to rewrite it as a Reader's Theatre piece! It was clear to me that her children became speakers, listeners, readers and writers after a year with her. I would be thrilled to have students come into my upper primary classroom after a year with her previously, and thrilled if she kept them for a second year in first grade. So, I hope you do take the rest of your school year to do "fun" reading activities! Start with a some simple reader's theatre scripts. Actually she took stories like Oh, Lovely Mud, and they wrote the pieces together. By the way Cambourne built on his conditions for learning with additions to his model for effective classroom/effective teachers that I had not read or heard him talk about before. He spoke about having a valid theory of learning (I connected it to Bonnie Campbell Hill's model with the child in the center and arrows running both ways to the essential components of learning.) He also spoke about the supportive routines that classrooms provide, including the language teachers use, and then basically the components of the literacy workshops. If someone wants to know more, I can get my notes. John > Part of me would love to just do a lot of fun reading activities like I used >to do such as acting out stories, making up new endings, writing a letter to >a favorite character but I know that there are more valuable things that I >should be teaching them to do in order to be better readers. _______________________________________________________ Sent through e-mol. E-mail, Anywhere, Anytime. http://www.e-mol.com _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
