These meetings are designed to create a network of peer support across the county for teachers who have been trained in Lucy Calkins Units of Study. Teachers will have opportunities to share ideas, discuss challenges, and to engage in collaborative problem solving. Agendas will be tailored to the needs of the teachers in attendance.

Join your Calkins colleagues in grades 3-5 for an in-depth look at two units of study: •Breathing Life into Essays (March 12): Help students to “grow” essays out of everyday living. This session builds on the idea of “teaching the writer, not the writing.” This Unit of Study helps students to continue to develop a repertoire of strategies for collecting entries or ideas for topics to write about. Students will learn to be observers in their lives, pushing themselves to develop thoughts in response to what they see and use writing as a way of thinking. •Writing Fiction: Big Dreams, Tall Ambitions (May 7): Students will learn to take the tiny details and big issues of their lives and speculate on how that could become a story. The “story mountain” becomes a tool not just for revision, but for planning their stories as students incorporate all they learned during the personal narrative unit of study. This session will show children that in fiction as in life, the solutions we find are generally those that we make, and if there are magic answers, they usually have been there before our eyes all along.

Join your Calkins Colleagues in grades K-2 for an in-depth look at three units of study and the conferencing handbook: • Unit Two: Small Moments – Personal Narrative Writing (Oct. 22): What better way to learn about your students than by listening to their stories? The goals of this unit are to help children understand that they can create stories out of the details of their own lives and that their stories can be retold in a detailed sequence of events. • The Conferencing Handbook (Dec. 10): Conferring is the heart of the writing workshop. This session will closely examine the conferencing handbook and explore how it is used in conjunction with the units of study. • Unit Three: Writing for Readers (Jan. 14): Up to now, you’ve reveled in your students’ approximations and praised every step in the right direction. Well, it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. You just can’t read their writing. The goal of this unit is to “spotlight the importance of spelling and punctuation by designing a unit of study that makes word walls, blends, and capital letters into the talk of the town.” • Unit Six – Nonfiction Writing: Procedures and Reports (March 11): The goal of this unit is to help students write with more clarity, sequence, explicit detail, and with the needs of an audience in mind. Students love this unit because they have the opportunity to become the “teacher” as they share their expertise through How-to, Informational, and Idea-Based writing.

Math and Science and Fun (9-11:30am): Babies are natural scientists and mathematicians. Learn ways to foster math and science discovery with young children. From Scribbles to Script (12-2:30pm): Learn about the developmental progression of writing and how to provide purposeful early instruction that supports the development of young writers.

These meetings will provide opportunities to meet and work with peers to share ideas and discuss challenges while developing curriculum to support specific needs of students.

Learn to identify the needs of your struggling readers and plan purposeful instruction in small groups. A variety of assessment tools and instructional approaches will be reviewed as teachers plan for differentiated instruction to support struggling readers. The focus of the course will be on small-group instruction.

Learn to identify the needs of your struggling readers and plan purposeful instruction in small groups. A variety of assessment tools and instructional approaches will be reviewed as teachers plan for differentiated instruction to support struggling readers. The focus of the course will be on small-group instruction.