Maine Reading Round Up

Hi, everyone! Here are the SlideShare links for my Maine Reading Round Up presentations:

Letting Kids Lead: How Books Can Empower Young People to Learn & Change the World

 The Stories Behind the Stories

And here are all the links and resources from my presentations as well as a whole bunch of others that I think might help you encourage authentic problem solving, reading, writing, & revision in your classrooms.   I hope you’ll find them helpful, and you should feel free to share this link with friends who were at the conference as well as colleagues who couldn’t make it. (I’d ask that you not copy & paste material to other websites & blogs, though. Mary Lee Hahn has an excellent post on Digital Citizenship that explains why, and I’ve also written about this in the Teachers Write community here.)

So…speaking of Teachers Write, here’s the home page that explains what we’re all about.  And here’s a link you can click to see all the latest Teachers Write posts from Summer 2012. We’ll be starting a new session in June, and I hope you’ll join us!

Kid-Sourcing.com – Great opportunities for kids to be engaged in real-world problem solving

“Sometimes on a Mountain in April” by Kate Messner – Poem to use as model for students’ descriptive place poems

65 Off-Draft Writing Prompts to Kick-Start Revision

“Real Authors Don’t Plan…Or Do They? An Open Letter to Tyler” Blog post that shows planning/outlining/idea-webbing  process for CAPTURE THE FLAG.

Turn Off the Spell Check – Thoughts on saving the copy editing for later to free up students for bigger-picture revisions (and directions for how to turn off the spell-check in Word!)

“The Book in My Mind” Kate’s poem on the need to write before you can revise & make magic!

Writing with Vivid Details: Using Photos for Inspiration to make settings more vivid

Google Maps Street View – How it works (great for when you can’t visit a setting in person!)

“How to Critique Writing” – Kate’s guest post for the Stenhouse Summer Blogstitute 2011 has seven tips to share with students.

Kate’s Pinterest boards (including discussion & resource guides for her kids’ books, REAL REVISION resources, and a handful of recipes that she’ll be too busy writing to make)

“Very Pinteresting”  Kate’s SLJ Feature on Pinterest and how librarians and teachers are using it to promote literacy & learning.

Scrivener home page, where you can read more about this digital writing/outlining tool and download a free demo.

“When a Book Title Goes Back to the Drawing Board” Kate’s blog post on brainstorming titles

Authors Who Skype with Classes & Book Clubs – Kate’s list of 100+ authors & illustrators who offer free 20-minute Q and A sessions with groups that have read one of their books.

“Met Any Good Authors Lately?” and “An Author in Every Classroom” are Kate’s SLJ features on Skype virtual author visits and how they can be used to provide students with published authors as mentors for their own writing after reading an author’s books.

“Pleased to Tweet You” is Kate’s SLJ feature on educators using Twitter as a teaching tool to connect students with authors and promote literacy.

“Revolution for the Tested” – Kate’s poem on the real reasons to read & write

REAL REVISION: AUTHORS’ STRATEGIES TO SHARE WITH STUDENT WRITERS from Stenhouse (link includes an online preview)