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Stay informed with regular updates by Lucy Calkins and colleagues at The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower
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Staff Developer Spotlight: Phil Seyfried
Get to know our wonderful Staff Developers as they share some of their favorite things! This week we are shining the light on Phil Seyfried!
Celebrating Excellence: Our Partner Schools Earn Blue Ribbon Awards!
We are thrilled to celebrate the achievements of our partner schools that have recently been honored with the prestigious Blue Ribbon School Award! This recognition highlights these schools’ commitment to educational excellence and learning and reflects the hard work of their teachers, students, caregivers, and communities involved.
Staff Developer Spotlight: Cynthia Satterlee
Get to know our wonderful Staff Developers as they share some of their favorite things! This week we are shining the light on Cynthia Satterlee!
Building a Reading Community
Creating a community of readers matters. Especially at the beginning of the school year, it’s critical that you take time to build a classroom community full of respect, with appreciation for each person and all their differences, and with a commitment to kindness.
Reflections on Learning: Reflective Writing in the Classroom
Reflective writing can serve as a powerful tool to help students cultivate critical thinking, self-awareness, and a deeper connection to learning. We think of reflective writing as students thinking, talking, and writing about their learning experiences in a way that helps them to work with more agency and independence. This sort of thinking and writing can be powerful at any point in the learning process, and it can be especially useful at the end of units.
Teacher Toolkits: What They Are, and How to Use Them
In order to maximize flexibility and responsiveness, teachers can benefit from a toolkit filled with the tips, tricks, and resources they can use to support the diverse needs of their students. Our teacher toolkits are designed to help you do just that–respond to the challenges your students might face by providing some of the resources and instruction each child might need to accelerate their progress across a particular unit, and across the school year.
Staff Developer Spotlight: Sarah Mann
Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the light on Sarah Mann!
Paul Bloomberg Supper Club Highlights
Join Paul and Lucy as they unpack the complex issue of efficacy in the educational sphere and explore how educators, armed with salient evidence and data, can set attainable goals for their classrooms and their schools.
Maurice Sykes Supper Club Highlights
Maurice Sykes has decades of experience under his belt, advancing high-quality early educational reform, teacher professional development, advancement and compensation. Join Maurice and Lucy and their Supper Club guests as they discuss the challenges faced by educators today – challenges that include toxic stress, burnout and depression.
Engaging Caregivers in Their Child's Reading Development
Helping a child build a reading life is an honor… and a major undertaking. As teachers, we value the home-school connection for all aspects of learning, but perhaps most especially when it comes to reading. Research shows that inviting caregivers to establish or deepen reading relationships with their children has benefits that go far beyond the academic, from enhancing empathy to strengthening familial bonds. And because the work of learning to read involves a complex matrix of skills, increased practice outside the classroom is always a plus.
Staff Developer Spotlight: Jepilyn Matthis
Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the light on Jepilyn Matthis!
Steven Ventura Supper Club Highlights
Supper Club guest Steve Ventura is an expert in implementing effective professional development across schools, districts and non-profit organizations throughout the country. Join him, as well as Director of Publications at RWP-M, Katie Clements, and longtime principal of PS 249, Dr. Elisa Brown, as they discuss how to best help school based leaders instill a culture that's grounded in collective teacher efficacy, especially through work with achievement teams.
Letters From Lucy: New Frontiers in Reading and Writing Institute Reflection
In this 'Letter from Lucy', Lucy recaps the intimacy and experience from our in-person New Frontiers in Reading and Writing Institute in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Building a Classroom Library on a Budget
Every classroom teacher understands the immeasurable value of a well-stocked library. After all, one of the things growing readers need most is to spend lots of time reading lots of books! However, curating a classroom library can be a real challenge, especially with limited resources. Here are 5 ways you can build your classroom library on a budget.
Tim Rasinski Supper Club Highlights
Tim eats, sleeps and breathes fluency. For over four decades, he has been actively studying literacy and fluency, first as a classroom teacher and later as a professor of literacy education at Kent State University, where he is now a professor emeritus. Tim has devoted his career to the building of literacy and – having written over 200 articles and authored, co-authored or edited over 50 books or curriculum programs on reading education.
Essential Tips for Teaching Letter Writing to Young Students
From letters of recommendation to emails between friends to direct messages with strangers on social media platforms, strengthening written communication and letter writing practices is beneficial and relevant, perhaps now more than ever.
Naomi Shihab Nye Supper Club Highlights
About Supper Club guest Naomi Shihab Nye, the poet William Stafford has said: “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight.” The same might be said of this award-winning Palestinian-American’s author’s intimate Supper Club talk with Lucy Calkins
12 QUOTES WE LOVE ABOUT WRITING
At The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower, we love that the craft of writing can be harnessed as the sincerest form of storytelling. Through writing, we are able to express our innermost thoughts and share our creativity in order to better connect with others. In this post, we have compiled 12 quotes we love about writing.
Where to Find RWP-M Tools and Resources
This post is intended to walk you through where key pieces of information live across our channels (website, various social media, email, etc) so you always have access to the tools, resources, and documents you may need from us to support you.
Help Students Plan for Summer Reading
Much has been written about the importance of summer reading (and the risk of “the summer slide”). If you think of summer as Yuyi Morales does, you see “the days stretched out like a blanket of warmth and possibility,” and the chance for the school year’s learning not to slip away, but to deepen and expand. Summer reading can solidify skills, grow knowledge, and unlock passions. Reading is portable too–perfect for summer adventures near and far! Here are some ways to help students maintain their reading lives across the summer and beyond.
Matt de la Peña Supper Club Highlights
It’s not every day we get to hear the thoughts and inner workings of a thoughtful and brilliant writer, but this is exactly what we have the opportunity to do when we listen to this Supper Club conversation between New York Times bestselling and Newbery Medal winning author Matt de la Peña and Lucy Calkins
2024 Summer Institute Overviews
Yasmina, a colleague at RWP-M, walks us through the topics and details of each of our 5 Institutes this summer.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert Supper Club Highlights
Freddy Hiebert has been a pioneer in the field of literacy, advancing strong and evidence-based reading instruction over the course of her career. In this informal conversation with Lucy, Freddy discusses her thoughts and views on the vitally important issue of the teaching of reading.
Staff Developer Spotlight: Alicia Luick
Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the light on Alicia Luick!
Staff Developer Spotlight: Casey Maxwell
Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the spotlight on Casey Maxwell!
Empower Young Poets: A Teacher’s Guide to Boosting Poetry Writing
Whether you’re teaching poetry with our resources like our “Poetry: Writing, Thinking, and Seeing More” in the Grades 3-5 If…Then… Curriculum Guide, “Poetry: Immersion and Innovation” in the Grades 6-8 If…Then… Curriculum Guide, using our Grades 7-8 Curriculum Calendar, “How to Eat a Poem,” or designing your own poetry unit, we’ve got tips to help!
Staff Developer Spotlight: Jessica Mazzone
Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the spotlight on Jessica Mazzone!
Staff Developer Spotlight: Logan Fisher
Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the spotlight on Logan Fisher!
Features of New Writing Units of Study, Grades 3-5
In this post we are breaking down the new features of our Grades 3-5 Units!
5 Tips for Supporting Your Priorities Amid Budget Cuts
This post breaks down 5 different ways to help support your educators professional development while balancing the reality of budget cuts.
20 Quotes about Reading & Books
The gift of reading is so profound; the ability to share stories, recount history, and express emotions can help us build empathy for those around us. In this post, we have compiled 20 quotes about reading and books that inspire us.
Literacy Professional Development
Five Ways To Learn With The Reading & Writing Project
3 Tips For Students Reading Below Benchmark
Today we are sharing 3 tips to help your students who are reading below benchmark handle complex texts.
6 Tips to Writing a High-Scoring Extended Response
If you’re looking for some quick tips to make the extended response more approachable, you’re in the right place. Below are 6 strategies to help you and your students achieve a high score.
3 Comprehension Strategies for Reading
Here are 3 comprehension tips to help your readers approach test passages with confidence and to hold onto what’s most important.
Vocabulary Success: How Elfrieda Hiebert’s Four C’s Can Transform Your Classroom
This post breaks down best practices, built around Freddy Hiebert’s four C’s, that could help transform vocabulary learning in your classroom.
Rebalancing Literacy Instruction: Key Talking Points and Research
This post aims to establish more common ground between Science of Reading and Balanced Literacy, while also clarifying some of the ways in which the two approaches continue to differ.
AI Learnings in the Classroom
Last month, Holly Clark, a leader in technology integration and the author of The AI Infused Classroom, came to visit us for a few days at The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower. This post shares our 3 takeaways from the session.
From Boxes to Bins: Unpacking Classroom Libraries
Wondering how to process your RWP-M classroom libraries as quickly and efficiently as possible?
Celebrating National Poetry Month
The poet Lucille Clifton said, “Poetry comes out of wonder, not out of knowing.” In honor of National Poetry Month, consider the power of poetry to capture the varied, nuanced, complex range of human emotions and experience.
Jump Rope Readers Are HERE!
Have you heard? Jump Rope Readers are here and ready for you to order now!