My First Education Conference #justteach

Front row for Linda Christensen (Left to Right: Frankie, Sarah, Kelli, Jessica, Caitlin) (PC: Dr. Johnson)

Hey everyone! I am so excited to share my experience from the RI Writing Project conference, especially for those who weren't able to make it. We missed you!!

The day started off with breakfast and the keynote speaker, Linda Christensen. As you can, expect those were both enjoyable to me! Christensen played a video:
https://youtu.be/qtOXiNx4jgQ
In this video, Denice speaks in her own accent mixing both Spanish and English to discuss her mother's accent. She says, "My momma hold her accent like a shotgun, with two good hands". Her mother uses English and Spanish together, to work with each other to keep her heritage alive as well as be able to communicate and embrace the life she has with two languages. I love the final line also, "her accent is a stubborn compass always pointing towards home". We discussed at the conference in our group the different accents in America. A question arose that really stuck with me... Why are some accents thought of being attractive and intelligent, while others are discouraged?

Another activity that I found amazing was called a Tea Party! I love this idea or a classroom activity also! We were all assigned a role and we were to share our stories with the other people. While listening to these stories, I looked into the common themes among the roles. These people were all forced to assimilate to the dominant culture and suppress their native language. The students we got to see in a video were students of Linda Christensen.... I wish I was in that class!! Anyways, these students completed the same assignment and they were able to make so many connections, including their own lives. I thought I loved Christensen while reading her book, but being able to listen to her speak to us on the issues of power and privilege, share her own teaching experiences and lessons and answer questions was something I will never forget.

Changing gears now.. moving to small workshops.
First up, The Importance of Putting Down Roots: Greek and Latin. Here, the two speakers had three stations of activities set up to teach the meaning of the roots and using a variety of words to students. We made riddles to reveal our words with specific roots, we played a game similar to go-fish to create words made with roots, bases and suffixes and we completed revising student work just by looking at overused and oversimplified words that could be expanded on. This workshop was very helpful in providing lessons that I will keep noted for a future classroom! Not to mention the fun I had while engaging in the activities!!

#selfie #meaningfulwriters #justteach

Last, and unfortunately my least favorite part of the day was Miracle Minis: Small Lessons to Teach Effective Narrative Writing. At first I thought I was just jealous I wasn't in Christensen's workshop, but I then continued to be disappointed. We went over a few lessons and examples of how to help students but the majority of the workshop was revolved around writing our own narrative.. actually the teacher was writing out a narrative. I would have liked to have a lot more focus on how to teach writing narratives and on the little lesson worksheets we were given because I already went through high school, college and have taken extensive English courses where I know how to write an effective narrative, but I had never seen the handouts for the lessons that we received. It was nice of the speakers to plan and take their time to share their knowledge with us, after the first two amazing sessions, I was expecting a little bit more from this one.

Overall, this was a wonderful first experience at an education conference. I am so happy I was able to share this experience with a few of my classmates. This made the day even more fun, while I learned a ton! I can't wait to look into more conferences and I will be keeping an eye out this time next spring for the annual writing project conference!