Recharge, Reflect & Regroup: Summer PD

If you are like most teachers, you need the summer to recharge your teacher batteries!  I know I do.  It doesn't take long and I am thinking about the next group of students that will be walking through my door for back to school.  

Thank you Teacher2Teacher for the graphic!

I just got back from a vacation to Colorado that helped me recharge.  Whether you go somewhere or stay home, a teacher needs a bit of time to slow down a bit, think of something other than school, and get re-engergized.  When I have done that, I am more in a state of mind to reflect on the past year and regroup for the changes I want to make in the upcoming year.   Actually, my brain likes to start this about April!  Anyone else like that?  I kind of have to bring that in because it is a bit early to start that!

If you have been reading blogs, following teacher Facebook pages or been on Twitter lately, then you know about this book.  I found this book to be a quick read  and full of easy to implement ideas.  The premise is having students do the thinking and problem solving instead of the teacher doing this for them.  As students work through how to solve problems in reading, they tend to show more growth than students who appeal to the teacher getting her to give prompts on what they could try to solve it.  I especially liked the chapter on shared reading and will mainly be using it to tweak this time in my classroom.  

This book came in while I was away on my trip.  It is about building engagement in your lessons and relationships with your students.  These are two areas that are very big in our school's new evaluation system.  You may also recognize this book from social media right now.

The Reading Strategies Book is full of ideas for teaching different reading skills and strategies.  I like that there are visuals included for the lessons.  I am a visual learner for sure!  Having pictures of actual anchor charts and other teaching aides is a big bonus!  I want to go over this book a little more this summer.  I would like to mark a few more of the ideas to try out this next year.  Jen Serravallo has short podcasts that you can listen to also.  Just search her name for the pod casts.

If you teach guided reading groups this is a great book for you!  Actually, one of these is the guided reading book, one is dvds where you can watch Jan Richardson teach lessons, and one goes with the dvds.  Great ideas and again, because I am a visual learner, I enjoy watching the dvds.

So these will be my summer professional development from home this year!  We start back in early August (summer goes by way too fast) so I've got ideas going and lists forming.  So how about you?  What teacher resources are you reading this summer?

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