• The seven year story of Joyful Literacy Interventions: an over 85% success rate for vulnerable children.
• A summary of the Video Series offering 18 practical video/PowerPoint presentations and Guiding Principles, a research-based book that addresses each video topic.
• A focus on the six Foundational Skills that have the greatest impact on children and are essential for literacy success.
• Ideas on how to use the Video series for a rich, annual Professional Development experience with dialogue, debate, collaboration and planning.
• An invitation to school staffs to engage and ignite enthusiasm for creating and employing joyful, practical change for vulnerable children.
• Plan for and manage transitions between the beginning and end of the change.
• Be prepared to address personal grief and loss experiences as normal. Accept people where they are in the process and provide time for those who need it.
• Use the opportunity to make creative and overdue changes that will be long-lasting.
• Rethink and reorganize human resources to better meet new and emerging needs.
• Develop new leadership plans and structures to support the planned changes.
• What experiences do vulnerable children need to raise achievement levels from 65% to 85% success in grades Pre-K to 3.
• Which Foundational Skills are essential and have the greatest impact on early learning success.
• How play remains the developmental base of early learning and is integrated with Joyful Literacy skill experiences.
• How recent brain research influences the structure of classroom design and behaviours.
• How detailed evidence gathered in hundreds of classrooms over the past seven years has proven the success of theJoyful Literacy Framework.
• Accommodating Tiers one, two and three children successfully in classroom design.
• Creating inclusive communities that collaborate for mutual benefit.
• Understanding and exploring how our teacher belief systems affect classroom design.
• Discovering and scaffolding each child’s unique qualities towards further successes.
• Designing varied teaching and learning experiences that meet all student needs.
• The evolution of play over decades, from discovery learning and socialization to practical, joyful learning via carefully constructed, playful activities.
• The importance of motivation in brain research and the effects of pleasure and joy on learning.
• How new learning occurs when materials are manipulated in a variety of ways.
• The link between the brain’s efficient pattern-making machinery and the importance of pattern-making in our language.
• Why daily imaginative play, joy, celebrations and themes are essential in early learning classrooms.
• An understanding of the research related to frequency of practice, the type of required skill development practice, and long-term memory success.
• Numerous practical ideas for simple, creative and child-inspiring skill practice activities.
• Strategies for organizing centres, training children to use centres calmly and responsibly, with rotation systems, and the inclusion of older students as mini teachers to coach younger children.
• Simple start-up ideas and resources for teachers new to practice centres.
• Integrating play with skills in a seamless, invisible way so children aren’t even aware they are working!
• A variety of examples and ways of re-structuring the day to increase time for practice, explicit instruction and joyful, active learning.
• Strategies for organizing a 120-minute literacy block to maximize the impact of an integrated schedule.
• Integration of other subjects into the literacy block in the early years and planning with students to focus on learning intentions.
• Organization of unstructured time to facilitate opportunities for themes, inquiry, collaboration and school-wide and peer projects.
• Planning ideas for weekly data collection and ongoing assessments.
• The silver lining of COVID-19 and lessons we can learn from the pandemic experience with parents as partners in the future.
• How assessment and data can be used to bring parents fully on board as equal participating partners.
• Practical strategies for engaging parents in meaningful ways, especially for increasing the number of doses of skill practice that vulnerable children need.
• Practice strategies for home that are not ‘homework’ – rather playful, joyful family experiences.
• Teaching children to teach parents to teach children – with bragging rights!
• The top six Foundational Skills named in the NELP (National Early Learning Panel) Report as 1. Alphabet, 2. Phonological Awareness, 3. Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), 4. Shared Reading and Writing, 5. Family Involvement, and 6. Fluency Development.
• Each of the well-researched six Foundational Skills described in detail including a breakdown of what to teach and how to teach it.
• The importance of using a combination of teaching, tracking and targeting specific skills on an individual child basis.
• The John Hattie research on the combination of repeated explicit teaching, modelling and ongoing practice as the most important strategies for reaching mastery.
• Seven tips and tools she uses to make this sacred instructional time effective.
• A description of how she organizes and reorganizes her small groups over the course of the year.
• How assessment and data guide her decisions related to explicit instruction and increasingly challenging expectations.
• How Foundations Skill instruction is woven seamlessly into the reading experience.
• Her effective structure organized through Familiar Reads, Learning Intentions, Book Walks, Whisper reading, When You’re Done, Comprehension, and Word Work.
• How daily fluency development lessons can be the most joyful event of the day, even in kindergarten classes where children cannot yet read.
• How shared reading and fluency development can be merged to create a powerful daily celebration.
• How to organize a five-day weekly plan for implementation ending with props and a classroom performance that will be the highlight of the week for the children.
• About the four major fluency skills in a four-level matrix that establishes expectations for fluency development.
• A tool for tracking and tracing skill progress in fluency development.
• The “I write, you write, together we compose” strategy.
• Mentor texts beginning with an in-depth shared reading experience as the motivation for personal writing with enthusiasm.
• Previously taught structures such as bold beginnings, wow words, and transition words.
• Body movement and student interaction strategies to stimulate oral language and excitement in preparation for writing and publishing.
• Scaffolding and coaching strategies through teacher feedback and child self-assessment: these help children to establish themselves as emergent and developing writers.
• The seven Traits are: 1. Inspiring Ideas 2. Shaping Organization 3. Sparking Voice 4. Expanding Word Choice 5. Sentence Fluency 6. Conventions and 7. Presentations.
• Janet and Dianne propose that these seven Traits be taught K to 5 in every classroom to develop a school-wide approach to writing by focusing instructionally on one Trait per month.
• The use of mentor texts connected to each specific Trait as models for exemplary writing.
• An emphasis on skill development using multimedia and joyful skill development rather than emphasizing authorship and final products.
• That teaching staff themselves experience the activities described in this presentation to develop a full understanding of the potential of this approach.
• There are seven comprehension skills that are achieved at different degrees of sophistication at each grade level. Can you name them?
• Success with independent comprehension skills requires prior knowledge of the alphabet, sight words, word study skills, and fluency. We can learn how to teach these skills in an integrated way.
• Comprehension skills are taught effectively over time by focusing on teaching one skill, featuring it on display and making connections with it over an extended period of time (a week or two); this happens by weaving the particular skill into all aspects of the curriculum.
• Mentor texts are a powerful way to introduce effective examples of comprehension skills.
• We recommend Maria Walther’s Ramped-up Read Aloud (2019) is an exemplar for comprehension instruction as well as well as other Foundational Skills.
• That these seven Traits be taught K to 5 in every classroom to develop a school-wide approach to writing by focusing instructionally on one Trait per month.
• The use of mentor texts connected to each specific Trait as models for exemplary writing.
• An emphasis on skill development using multimedia and joyful skill development rather than emphasizing authorship and final products.
• That teaching staff themselves experience the activities described in this presentation to develop a full understanding of the potential of this approach.
• How the Circle Charts provide teachers with a tool for planning, assessing, and tracking all essential Foundational Literacy Skills.
• How teachers can find time to complete and manage the assessments.
• How teachers use the data to plan weekly whole group, small group, and individual instruction.
• How teachers use the data to plan for tier one, two, and three levels of instruction.
• How Circle Charts reveal gaps in learning that may require special education services or additional classroom support. The Charts not only become a very persuasive tool for parents and administrators, but kids find them to be motivational too!
• The concept of Blitzing: it can take many forms in either a classroom or as part of special education services school-wide.
• How Blitzing can provide short doses of skill practice, thereby closing gaps before the children fall behind.
• How children are organized into Blitz groups; how teachers manage the groups; how children enter and exit the Blitz; and how celebrations mark progress.
• The types of practice games and activities that work well in Blitzing and how teachers can organize older students or adults to further support Blitzing activities.
• The difference between Practice Centres and Blitzing.
• How she has ‘fallen in love’ with data; how she teaches, traces and tracks skill. development so she can change the trajectory of her students’ developments.
• Her favourite quote: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!”
• How she designs charts to track, cluster, and group her children’s skills according to the data –– charts that support her decisions for the adjustments she makes to her instructional strategies.
• She shares the joy she has experienced working in collaboration with other staff and data: “Children are the priority; change is the reality; collaboration is the strategy”.
• Janet reviews the changes in data over a five-year period in hundreds of classrooms implementing the Joyful Literacy Framework - 89% success in grade four up from 49%.
• She and her staff developed an innovative strategy to trace, track and study student relationships for the purpose of supporting children struggling with friendships.
• They designed questions for an interview process which they used school-wide to gather social data.
• They constructed the concept of “stars” and isolates” to study extremes in social popularity and choices.
• They analyzed the data and created plans to improve social relationships.
• The staff then planned collaboratively to connect these “stars and isolates” in ways that would enhance learning through social connections cross-grade.
