What to do when students become dazed and confused by what they are trying to read?   Use new, explicit reading techniques that help struggling readers develop the skills they need to become independent readers.  This workshop will demonstrate powerful, effective, and ready-to-use “best practices” to help all students become successful, critical readers.  This workshop will also focus on the essential elements of successful reading, on cutting-edge techniques for promoting student success, and on ways to evaluate student achievement. 

This workshop will present powerful and practical ideas for implementing effective writing activities in the Language Arts classroom.  This workshop will focus on how a guided, process approach to teaching writing can help students become more proficient, knowledgeable, and self-directed writers.  As such, this workshop will present lots of guided writing strategies for teaching students to craft patterns, paragraphs, and poetry.  Since the workshop is grounded in the notion that we learn best by doing, workshop participants will engage in a number of sustained writing activities throughout the day.

The focus of this workshop is on teaching students to understand and use the 17 essential elements of grammar in their writing.  When students consciously learn to use these 17 elements of grammar, they will develop the essential skills that will enable them to write consciously, powerfully, effectively, and confidently.

Students often get bogged down when they tackle nonfictional texts.  This workshop will demonstrate ways to enable all students to develop critical skills to read and write nonfiction.  “Best practices” will also be shared in these areas:  techniques for setting purposes before reading, strategies for developing comprehension, and methods to stop the copying when students write research reports

This workshop is packed with myriad techniques and a plethora of strategies to help students develop strong working vocabularies.  By engaging in the three step process of discovery, reflection, and association, students will find ways to make new vocabulary words “stick” in their minds.

Put literacy on stage in your classroom!  This workshop will show you how to help your students develop key literacy skills through oral language, drama, and storytelling.  Because students become more literate when they internalize language presented in dramatic ways, they need clear access to those strategies that will help them do so.  This workshop will focus on the following:  ways to read aloud to students, how to teach students how to read aloud expressively, how and why to use drama in the classroom, techniques for introducing drama, techniques for improvisation, and strategies for storytelling.

Spice up your G/T curriculum with higher order literacy!  This fun, dynamic, and interactive workshop will deliver a plethora of ideas to help all G/T language arts students develop and strengthen higher order reading and writing skills.  This workshop will focus on "exemplary practices" to help G/T students develop higher order thinking skills and engage in active learning.  Specific areas to be addressed are:  new ways to develop reading fluency, deep  comprehension, writing skills, and vocabulary development.

• "How Students Think and What We Can Do About It!"   A fun and entertaining presentation on learning styles.

• "Expect Surprises, but Surprise Expectations!" Being a teacher is full of surprises, but the most effective teachers constantly surprise their students.  This keynote offers funny anecdotes from the teaching life and a few powerful examples of how we can best surprise our students.

• "What Story Are You From?"  Everyone has a story, and this very entertaining presentation focuses on the power of stories and how we can use them in the classroom to create a love of literacy.