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Sunday, July 10, 2016

Summertime Reading and a Big Change!

As my 10th year teaching English and History to grade 7-9 students at the same school comes to a close, with it comes a big change.  Next year, I have decided to take a two year leave from my current job, and will be going to work as a Literacy Helping Coach with our districts's curriculum department.  They will be filling my old job with a temporary teacher for two years, so after that I can decide if I want to go back to that job, or apply for an additional two years with the curriculum department.  This will be a huge change for me, and it will be really strange not setting up my classroom for September, but I am super excited about the new opportunities this new position will bring.  

Do any of your guys work in this capacity?  I would love to hear about your experiences!

With the new job comes a large amount of summer reading - so many professional reads I have been wanting to get caught up on!  My office "summer reading" bookshelf currently looks like this:
I think I am going to busy :)

I generally read quite a bit during the school year, but as my time is so much more limited, I don't read nearly as much as I would like to.  I tend to use my summer to make up for this, and have always spent a significant amount of my summer days reflecting on the past year and brainstorming new strategies.  Currently, I am plowing through Carol Ann Tomlinson's "Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom".  I had heard great things about this book, and that it is essentially many people's "Go-To" when it comes to differentiating in their classrooms.  Reading it has really made me reflect back on my last year's class, and ways that I could have structured things a bit differently.  I had quite a few gifted kids last year, and this book has some great strategies that I could have used to challenge them a bit more.  If you take a close look at the picture of my copy that I included below, you can see a bunch of the sticky notes I have coming out of the top with ideas I want to come back to.  The book is well worth the read if you haven't had a chance to pick it up yet.

On my wish list is Jennifer Serravallo's "The Reading Strategy Book", and David Burgess's "Teach Like a Pirate".  I have heard great things about both, and am looking forward to adding them to my book pile.

Have you read any of these books?  Let me know which ones are your favorites!

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