❤️  Refining Curriculum and Building Community in Culturally Relevant Ways

Let’s engage in the work of equity and inclusion to shift our own mindsets in service of creating more identity- and justice-focused, global-minded classrooms. We’ll focus on making revisions to instructional components and structures, units of study, work spaces, materials and lessons, and home-school partnerships. 

🌟  Play Structures, Spaces, and Materials to Ignite Learning

Let’s observe children’s work in play to learn about strengths, abilities, interests, and other aspects of their identities to ensure that structures, spaces, and materials provide a range of choices and opportunities for creation, exploration, and skill development across learning domains for all children. A focus on outdoor experiences might be included in this work to provide additional opportunities for inclusive social-emotional and literacy learning.

🌟 ✏️  Play-Literacy Connections to Promote Skill Development

Let’s explore and cultivate the powerful connections that exist between play and literacy. We’ll observe children at play to learn ways they are already engaging with literacy skills and name next steps for extension through teacher interactions, introduction of particular literacy-inspiring materials, and book-making. In Kindergarten and First Grade classrooms we will plan for alignment with experiential learning such as Play Workshop or Makerspace. 

✏️ Writing Unit Enhancement focusing on Engagement, Equity, and Explicit Teaching of Emergent Language and Literacy

Let’s refine writing units or modules with the goal of including more opportunities for experiential learning and connections to children's identities, families, and local community. This work might look like aligning choice workshop, an oral language component, or makerspace time directly to the writing objectives. We also might choose more relevant mentor texts or make connections to knowledge-building work in the content areas. More explicit lessons can be crafted that ensure the transfer of phonemic awareness, phonics, and language skills to pen and paper writing. There are so many possibilities depending on the goals and standards for the classroom and school and the children being served.

✏️ Writing Development and Instructional Methods

Let’s grow our knowledge of writing development including engagement, motivation, habits, phonics application, sentence construction, organization, and complexity of detail. Through studying the progressions of skill development, including the very early foundational skills, in each of these areas, we will better be able to assess and prioritize skill instruction for young writers.  Modeled, Guided, and Independent Writing methods will be explored.

📚💬 Read Aloud and Oral Language Experiences to Build Community, Knowledge, and Skills

Let’s grow our repertoire of language comprehension and expression instruction techniques in literacy components such as read aloud and storytelling. This includes a focus on text choice, building text sets, and lesson planning that builds on social experiences in the classroom, knowledge of student identities, and reading and writing skill data.

🔤  Foundational Skill Instruction and Practice Experiences Across the Day

Let’s grow our knowledge of phonemic awareness, letter recognition, early phonics skills, and the ways they develop in order to plan for repeated and targeted practice of these key foundational skills.  Methods such as shared reading and shared writing will be explored in addition to other short, powerful techniques to include in whole-class, small-group, and individual instructional and practice sessions.

✏️ 📚 Small-Group and Individualized Instruction 

Let’s grow our knowledge of reading, writing, and phonics development and the repertoire of instructional methods that support learners in growing in these areas. Assessments will be prioritized, data analyzed, and methods and texts chosen to target particular skills so that each child will have personalized cycles of instruction and practice that set them up for success.

📋 Curriculum Planning and Refinement

Let’s set up structures for unpacking and implementing writing and reading curriculum in efficient, effective, and student-centered ways. Support can be provided for published curricular materials or teacher-created units of study depending on your district's expectations.

🕐 Prioritizing and Scheduling Across the Day, Week, and Unit

Let’s create practical schedules for whole-group instructional components as well as the time blocks when more individualized instruction is occurring. Included in this will be a focus on knowing where learners are in their literacy development to prioritize current components and anticipate how schedules may shift over time.

My partnership with scholars and colleagues in the field as well as a range of school communities allows me to continue to grow knowledge that I bring with me to the professional learning opportunities I develop for and with each school. I look forward to the possibility of forming a partnership with your community and growing together in these areas. Feel free to reach out via email at rachel@wegrowtogetherllc.com or fill out this interest form. Thank you!

Yours in learning,

Rachel Rothman-Perkins, We Grow Together, LLC