Teacher College Reading Writing Project and the New York Experience

Ok, so I've been super slacking off on this whole blogging thing and with good reason. I just got back from attending the TCRWP at Columbia University. The Reading Institute is a week long, 30 hour professional development run by Lucy Calkins and her amazing staff developers. TCRWP promotes using the Units of Study curriculum in both reading and writing. Our school does not use this curriculum, rather we use Reading Street (I'm not a big fan of using basel readers), but I did learn many strategies that I hope to implement into my classroom for this upcoming academic year. 30 hours of learning later, I found the importance of using post-it notes so the kiddos can record their wonderings and reading conversations, a huge toolkit for conferences, a plethora of awesome anchor charts, how to use conferring data to help you determine where your students are, the importance of reading logs and so much more. I can't believe I'm actually excited to teach reading this year!

Above, Christopher P. Curtis, author of Bud, Not Buddy - a truly inspirational man, with an insane sense of humour! Will be adding Bud, Not Buddy to my read aloud list this year! David Adler of the Cam Jamsen series also spoke too! 

Spending a fortnight in New York was such good fun. I'm a city girl, having lived in London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong for most of my life, so navigating NYC was relatively easy. I ate ALOT! I spent a lot of time running from restaurant to restaurant catching up with various friends. Sales were a massive hit! I also made my way into the only Scholastic Store in the world and OMG, I wanted to buy so much for my classroom. I ended up spending quite a fortune in there, but luckily there is a teacher's discount of 25%. My kiddos are going to be excited with the new additions to our classroom library! The staff at the store are super friendly and knowledgeable in current books ( I needed more "boy" books for my library), so if you are in the neighbourhood, I recommend you to pop in for a visit! 

I got to catch up with my friend Amanda aka the real life Lara Croft. We spent many days exploring the UWS for their drinking haunts.  This lovely lady has an impressive resume: ex Navy diver, Master Chef, Archaeologist, Fitness Model and now Masters student at Columbia's Journalism school.  Check out her blog www.apronsandsneakers.com. iPad users, download Glam Today, she is featured on their cover! 

NYC before sunset - Empire State Building