The Reading and Writing Project!

What is the purpose of the Reading and Writing Project?

To develop grade level independent readers of complex text and grade level writers

What is the BIG PLAN?

Have you ever thought about the power of your team?  I am proud to announce that on our campus we have embarked on a task that involves the whole village!  Every middle school teacher and student will be participating in a monthly close reading and writing lesson during our ACE /homeroom time and we will use that information to help guide our instruction through out the month in the areas of reading and writing.

Today was our first lesson and every student read the same text and annotated their articles in their classrooms.  This was a cold read.  No extreme scaffolding for us!  No partner talk to make meaning during the first read through.  It was a task given to see what our students could do on their own.  This is harder than it sounds.  We love to share our thinking.  We love to work together to make meaning!  But, today we allowed our students to think for themselves. This is the beginning of a very gritty relationship!

The administration team, me and my assistant principal, lead the first lesson on our broadcast that runs daily.  We will conduct two more lessons over the next few days and than we will bring all our information together to debrief and discuss at our team collaboration meetings. There is power in school wide information and this data will help us create a clear picture of our students abilities to read and write independently.

Next month our English Language Arts team will be in charge of leading the learning and each team through out the year will have an opportunity to teach the entire school for one week each year.  I am pretty excited about what we will read about when it is the science and math team’s turn to conduct their lessons.

(FYI: We have utilized the reading and writing rubric of David Pook and the research of Nancy Frey and Doug Fischer to help us create a school-wide CCSS  literacy plan for our school)

I have also included a short video clip of my observations about day one lessons on our campus and student responses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eBdi_o8jMQ

It is a great day to be stuck in the middle and we are full of anticipation for what the next few days will bring as we embark on the next two days of our Reading and Writing Project on our campus!