2023 Summer Collaborative Work

In July of 2023 I had the pleasure of attending the K-2 Phonics Summer Institute with TCRWP. For the last three years or so, the second grade team has been using the Phonics Units of Study and I wanted to explore the curriculum with the experts in order to gain a deeper understanding of their recommended practices in second grade as well as K-2.

Since using this program, one of the things I have struggled with most is time managment. Like much of the TCRWP units, the lessons are wordy and often include a lot of content. One of the most helpful tips that they gave us to manage the time, was to not call on students during the mini lesson. This seems so simple, yet, it goes against what seems natural for me as a teacher. After all, don't we want to hear students voices/thoughts in a whole class…

I had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with Juliana over the summer before the school year began. The planning time was immensely beneficial for me as a new teacher in 7th-grade education and within the new environment of Burke's School. She got me excited about the curriculum in the year to come! 

Juliana explained to me that she wanted to shift the curriculum by adding two novels, A Rover's Story, and The Joy Luck Club. A Rover’s Story is a great novel that warms up that reading muscle and generates discussion for the identity unit we are beginning. I even have an idea for a speaker and I’m really hoping they can join to add to this introduction! I was able to ask questions and plan for my own lessons throughout our planning time. We created some materials for our opening unit and planned hands on activities as well.

Our…

On July 12th I met with Lizzy and Tammi to work on reviewing our SEL curriculum so we could be intentional about what we plan to teach this school year. It was very helpful to have the time to review and look at the past years of work as well as create a color-coded document where we planned the first few months of school. We color-coded our work so we could make sure that all categories (citizenship-responsibility leadership; exploring self-identity; building communication toolbox language; growing voice to be an advocate) would be focused on more evenly this year. As we know, one can easily fall into the trap of focusing on certain topics and others fall through the cracks. This intentional planning will hopefully allow us to hit all topics throughout the year pretty evenly as this guide will help us better see if a topic needs to be taught more…

I met with Lizzy Charnas and Simone Wolk in July 12th to look back at this year's SEL work and compare it to what we have done in the past several years. We created a document as we planned week to week activities, and then we chose the labels: citizenship, exploring self-identity, building communication toolbox, growing voice to be an advocate, and creating an inclusive community. We color-coded these labels so that we could see the balance (or lack of) of the activties when looking at our week to week agenda. This was extemely helpful. We each have our biases and "favorite activties," so the color coding helped us to be mindful of covering all 5 S.E.L. themes to the degree which best represents a robust 4th Grade S.E.L. program. We were able to plan detailed lessons up to Winter Break. This has given us a fabulous start to th…