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Stay tuned this morning as I add to this post about #KidLitPalooza, live from this amazing event that connects children's authors to students!

Take a little tour with me as I share highlights from this new book by Katie Egan Cunningham.

Don't shy away from the formulaic "I am" poem! There are so many possibilities...

When I tested Jennifer Serravallo’s Independent Reading Assessment (Scholastic), I was an immediate believer. Finally, here is a reading assessment that gives rich, clear information about upper grade readers, using an authentic reading… Continue reading →

Every summer I dream of my classroom. When considering my third grade writers, what do they need to grow and how can I provide classroom spaces for that?

“Writers,” Ali said as she leaned in close to teach her second graders, “I’ve got an important tip for you about your realistic fiction characters. You’ve done such a great job describing what they are… Continue reading →

Some weeks ago, when the school year was brand new, I wrote about setting up our Reading Journals for a year of writing about our reading.  Now we are approaching the end of… Continue reading →

When I first began teaching, Nancie Atwell’s In The Middle was my go to PD book for all things to do with reading and writing workshop.  I modeled so many of my teaching… Read More →

This week I’m sharing the Happy Like Soccer craft table my graduate students created.  My students worked in partnerships to flesh out explanations for craft moves they identified in Maribeth Boelts’s book on… Read More →

This is the second in a series of three posts that include craft tables you can download for use during your conferences or strategy lessons.  If you missed last week’s post, which talked… Read More →

Stella Villalba teaches English as a Second Language at Beechwood Elementary in Columbus, Ohio. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she started her career in education teaching ESL in Asuncion, Paraguay. Stella also publishes articles on the topic of teaching ELLs at Choice Literacy and is a teacher consultant for the Columbus Area Writing Project. Stella [...]

Edited by Ruth: Pssst…today is Mary Helen’s birthday! Won’t you join me in leaving comments on her blog post about one of her very favorite books? Mary Helen Gensch is currently a literacy coach and Title I interventionist for Pierceton Elementary School in Indiana. Her journey as a writing coach began with the AllWrite!!! Consortium [...]

Ruth was shocked when she learned that I had never heard of Scaredy Squirrel Books when we passed the Kids Can Press Booth at the NCTE Conference.  Quite frankly, once I started paging Mélanie Watt’s first Scaredy Squirrel Book, which was published four years ago, I, too, was shocked.  It was humorous!  I found the [...]

When I was at the TCRWP’s Writing Institute a couple of weeks ago, there was a buzz about the power of three. Funny how I’ve been in and around lots of writing-related professional development in the past five years and have never heard anything about the power of three until mid-August. I heard [...]

I had the absolute pleasure of listening to Pam Muñoz Ryan deliver the keynote address at the TCRWP Writing Institute this past Wednesday. (And to make things even better, she even signed my copy of Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride for me.) The topic of her keynote address was “Reading to Write, [...]

The Reading Specialist in my school recently lent me her copy of The Fluent Reader: Oral Reading Strategies for Building Word Recognition, Fluency, and Comprehension by Timothy V. Rasinski after a brainstorming session we had about ways to help two of the students in my class who have not met the reading benchmark for this [...]

Here’s a link to the final document that focuses on how to lift the level of your students’ conventions by using The Pencil by Allan Ahlberg.  (If you haven’t seen the draft I posted last week, then click here.) Posted in conventions, mentor texts, reading-writing connections, voice   Tagged: Allan Ahlberg   

During Family-Teacher Conferences, one of my students mentioned that she wanted to know “what that line was” that Harper was using throughout Just Grace, a book I lent her. I figured she meant the dashes, and once she showed it to me, I realized my hunch was correct. Then my student said, “I [...]

I dissected Angela Johnson’s Book, A Sweet Smell of Roses, to the best of my ability today. I created wordy teaching points so you can truly help your students to see what craft moves Johnson made (at least, the ones I think she made). This will help you show the writers in your [...]

I’ve been toting around Those Shoes a lot when I’m conferring with my students lately. I’m teaching them things like how to vary sentence lengths and ways to incorporate precise language into their personal narratives by showing them multiple places in Boelts’ Text where she does these things. However, late last week, when I was [...]

Reading texts like a writer… Using mentor texts to become a better writer… These things aren’t new to me, but they’re often new concepts for my students when they enter my classroom each fall. Over the past two days (of Rosh Hashanah) I’ve had the privilege to spend a lot of time contemplating the way in which I [...]

I worked on the Reading-Writing Connections Document for Those Shoes this evening. Here’s an example of the way I set it up: Craft Move Page Number(s) Why the Author Might Be Doing This… Varied Sentence Lengths Pgs. ,2, 15 & 30 One thing writers do is vary the lengths of their sentences when they write. If an author wants [...]

I realize I’m a bit late to the “Those Shoes Party,” which is a touching text written by Maribeth Boelts and illustrated by Noah Z. Jones. Those Shoes was published in 2007 and is the story of a little boy who desperately wants the shoes that nearly everyone else in school has. The [...]

I was perusing the Heinemann and Stenhouse Websites today looking for new books about the teaching of writing. I came across a [...]

Four New York editors, an agent, and a bestselling
author are coming to Connecticut on Saturday, April
26th for another F1rst Pages conference, one with a
new imprint launching in Fall 2008! One of those
prominent editors, making her own path in the business
is Adriana Dominguez, Executive Editor of Latino
imprint, Rayo, at HarperCollins. If you want to learn
more about publishing in the Latino market and receive
feedback on your work, make sure not to miss Adriana's
workshop. (See link below)

So if you can make it, the networking experience will
be worth your while and there are opportunities to
work with professional editors and an agent in an
intimate group and have the chance to submit. There
is an opportunity to be acquired if you have the right
stuff.

Just make sure you read the guidelines carefully.
Just a reminder that the navigation bar is at the top
of the page and the payment links are at the bottom of
each publishing professional's page.

Go to www.f1rstpages.com - click on conference tab or
go directly to the conference at
www.f1rstpages.com/conference.