This institute has been full on. I’ve not had a chance to blog about it, because I’m too busy doing my own writing each evening. This morning, before James Howe’s Keynote address he showed the following YouTube Video. I’m inserting it below, to share my excitement about being here at the conference and about being in NYC in general. Breakdowns of the sessions I’ve attended will be posted following the 4th of July. Enjoy!

Today is the last day of school. Tomorrow we will board a plane for the US. The year is officially OVER. My next posts will be from the TCRWP Institute in NYC June 29-July 3.

Until then, here is a look at my coaching space at ACS. It is, as always, a work in progress. In this video you will see how we have organized our DRA testing papers (cutting down on lines at the copy machines), big books, a large collection of leveled texts students can take for home reading, our leveled library, and professional books. The space is quite large and allows for demonstration teaching (lab sites) as well as plenty of room for teachers to meet for professional development. (I apologize for the way this video ends. I was surprised by another teacher and forgot to edit the end before I made it into a movie.)

Next year we will be receiving 1,000s of books to support our reading and writing workshops. When you are working from such a great distance, we have to be very careful that we know what supplies we have and what has been lost, so initially these books will be organized, inventoried, and stored by me.

If you have any ideas for organizing and managing books for teachers to check out and use, I would love to hear your thoughts.

To honor the new United States National Day On Writing (Oct. 20) Lucy Calkins has a video post on Heinemann. I thought it was inspirational. It might inspire you. It might inspire your students. She talks about honoring writing… and writing powerfully.

Give it a look by clicking HERE.

Last week I worked with Marisa in her fifth grade classroom on Lesson 4 from Launching the Writing Workshop. We wanted to demonstrate a bad conference vs. a good conference for her students to help ensure they fully participate in this important part of the writing workshop. (In this lesson in the book, Lucy provides a helpful Student A/B script which I’ve used before with kids to demonstrate what Marisa and I did here.)

In this video, you will see Marisa and I modeling how a conference might go at this point in the unit. To give Marisa my full attention I told the kids I wasn’t writing notes during this particular conference, but following it I probably would.

This clip highlights the 4 phases a teacher ideally will go through during a conference: Research, Decide, Teach, Link. Also, you can see how Marisa as the writer is encouraged and pushed ever so slightly into continuing to do good work.