Maximizing your impact

Presented by Judi Moreillon

Judi is a former classroom teacher and library media specialist. She wrote, Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension: Maximizing Your Impact from those experiences. This book offers various lesson plans that involve collaboration for K-6. She is now back in the classroom, this time at the secondary level in order to gain experience and data to prove that these ideas can also be utilized at a higher level. She assured her audience that a second book will be written after her research is complete.

The main point of this session was:
Information skills and reading comprehension are not 2 separate entities but instead work in conjunction with each other.

There were many interesting parts to this session. There was so much information jammed into 90 minutes that I will try to relay the highlights and trust that my fellow bloggers will explain what I have left out.

Judi has a captivating personality. She began the session with a energetic story about a turtle and a jaguar. Making the point that every effort we make leaves some type of mark on the students that we encounter.
Judi also offered valuable tools to assist students with reading comprehension with her exercise from Seven Blind Mice. We experienced some hands-on activities when we broke into groups of five or six to compare the AASL standards to reading comprehension strategies. Through this examination we discovered that these standards are interchangeable and classroom teachers with librarians are both working towards the same goals with these standards; to have children learn to read and then read-to-learn.

Lastly, Judi read a couple pages from a book she wrote about 10 years ago, Sing Down the Rain, about the Tohono O'odham tribe's ritual for bringing rain. She offered some background information and assigned teams of 2 people each to fill in a venn diagram using a graphic organizer with information about this tribe of people.

I appreciate that Judi shared several activities that we can immediately incorporate into our own curriculum.

If you attended the conference but missed this session then look on page 67 in your binders - Big Ideas and bibliography. If you are reading this from home or work then visit Judi's website to find more information.