The Huntington Viking participants at the Content Literacy Academy shared our experiences with Mrs. Holloway, our principal, and we set about incorporating the strategies from the conference into out Literacy Excel Program. Each day, beginning today, September 14, from 8:25-8:45 a.m. our school will focus on literacy instruction using the Magnificent Seven Strategies. All administrators and specialists will visit classrooms daily and provide feedback. Everyone will focus on making connections and asking questions across contents during this quarter and use Comprehension Strategies Instruction (CSI) by Pacific Learning. To prepare our teachers, we held three staff development training sessions, the first, August 27, focused on team building and the question, “Why focus on literacy?” Teachers reviewed what a nurturing literacy classroom environment should look like and every teacher’s class has the Magnificent Seven posters displayed! The second staff development, September 1, focused on the overview of the Magnificent Seven strategies and their application in the classroom with the use of the jigsaw strategy, and we modeled the use of the Bio-poem for students’ team building. On Thursday, September 3, the team facilitators planned and modeled the content literacy lesson in each subject area, and the teachers applied their experiences with the use of the literacy timeline.
All of our teachers are in professional learning communities. Marcia Little and Rosalyn Price are the facilitators for science teachers; Karen Hinton, and Sallie Herndon, are the facilitators for social studies teachers; Valerie Banks, and Vanessa Stephens are the facilitators for math teachers; and Arleatrice Winters and I, Alice M. Alexander, are the facilitators for English teachers. Our first week of Literacy Excel was a big success!
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Kudos to Huntington Vikings. Alice, I enjoyed reading your Blog. You set center stage for the rest of the Huntington participants on the Content Literacy Team. Thank you so much.
ReplyDeleteAlice, you did a wonderful job of explaining what we are doing at Huntington Middle School. I have done some visits on the other halls and the community boards are wonderful. I think the students are really learning the strategies we chose for the first nine weeks (making connections and asking questions).
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