Exhausted from the year and overwhelmed with end of year tying up of loose ends, my brain is naturally (neurotically) buzzing with possibilities for next school year…
- Have my students jump into their reading lives with reflection. This past year we did visual biographies inspired by illustrations of James Gulliver Hancock. Next year, I want students to practice expressing their ideas in a variety of ways. Infographics seem like a great place to start. This edutopia article gives a variety of suggestions for sites to help create such infographics and a few mentors to take a look at with students
- Take a page (or leave) from the brilliance of Charles Moore and create a giant tree in my room. With different colored leaves for each class period, we’ll celebrate our reading over the course of the year by recording the books each class has tackled. Adding some student photos with their favorite books will be the best “fruit” our tree could produce.
- Return to my index card filing system for my classroom library. I should know better. I like to see the stack of cards to know where our classroom library books are. It brings me peace to see the enormous stack of checked out books throughout the year, and then watch the stack dwindle toward the end of the year. English teacher therapy.
- Go back through this blog and somehow catalog all the great ideas I want to try…
To assist with your own planning for next year, do we have a deal for you!
Throughout the summer, we look forward to sharing with you some of this school year’s greatest hits here at Three Teachers Talk. With a bounty of new contributors, whose enthusasim for developing the reading and writing lives of their students has been a blessing to our worshop voice, and our own continued journies as readers, writers, and workshop advocates, Amy, Shana, and I are thrilled to share some of these brilliant posts with you once again.
Additionally, the summer will be filled with new posts and ideas to get you ready for the year ahead. We can’t wait!
Between classes yesterday, my neighbor Brandon and I chatted about all the changes we want to make for next year. Conferring with a slightly different system. Tweaking policies to allow for more authentic accountability and tweaking practice to allow for more self-reflection across the school year. Securing subsricptions to flipgrid to get quick snapshots of student thinking and allow them to view and comment on those insights.
We agreed with bright smiles, as every growing teacher does at the end of a successful school year, that next year will be even better. Cheers to this year and to next. Enjoy every moment of your well deserved summer vacation, Three Teachers Nation.
We love this journey and roadtripping it through this wonderful world of workshop with you makes it even sweeter.
Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of incredible English educators at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. She can’t wait to start her summer reading and looks most forward to sharing the summer with her recent 4K graduate, Ellison. She’s my reason. 
Three Teachers Talk 
Ellison is super cute!! I’m definitely making a Reading Tree in my room next year, and I need to think about an index card system for my library. I lost so many favorite books this year that just didn’t come back from wherever they went. Hopefully the kids who have them are reading them and loving them and they just haven’t been relegated to someone’s backseat or under the pile of teenaged chaos in someone’s room. I’ve already started thinking and planning, too—one of my favorite parts of summer!
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