Pre-K Institute

Monday, March 22 - Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Institute will be offered virtually through Zoom.

Apply Now

Grade: Pre-K
Hours: 11am-5pm Eastern Standard Time
Featuring: Rachel Rothman-Perkins, Christine Holley, and Sara Berg
Payment: Purchase orders for this institute can be made out to: Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, 525 W 120th Street, Box 77, New York, NY 10027

The beloved Pre-K institute is back. This year’s institute is brought to you with a new emphasis on texts and how to leverage them to work on key skills in Pre-K classrooms. Presenters will help you envision all of the text possibilities that teachers can use in their classrooms, including books, songs, poems, photographs, videos, and the like. You’ll learn how to include various texts formats to develop literacy skills as well as content area knowledge and social skills.

Well-planned read alouds are a cornerstone of powerful classroom instruction. You’ll learn how to use books—and alternative texts—as read alouds that spill across the day. You’ll see how read alouds can provide the opportunity to support language development, including phonological awareness and early concepts of print. You’ll leave armed with a toolkit of ways to assess and support these skills using a variety of texts.

We know that play is central to the work that students take on in a Pre-K classroom so we’ll teach you ways that texts can enrich that play. From studying a ship and then building it to role-playing favorite characters, you’ll see how the community texts you choose can bring new energy and life into the fun. You’ll also learn how the books you read can enhance the social-emotional skills that develop during play for students. You’ll hear how books can inspire talk and role-play around collaboration and decision-making and how characters can become tangible symbols for the type of community members you are working to develop in your classrooms.

The texts we read can inspire young authors as well. You’ll learn how to study authors and illustrators with your students. Through texts, they’ll learn about what it means to be an author and how books are made. You’ll learn how to motivate your youngsters to use this information to make books of their very own, using your community favorites as mentors. You’ll also learn how to inspire “writing” based on the texts you read by providing opportunities, modeling and materials. You’ll hear how drawing, oral storytelling, photographing, videotaping, conventional pen to paper work, and even playing with blocks can all be part of these writing experiences.

Lastly, you’ll learn how to use texts to support inquiry and content-area learning. You’ll learn about the inquiry process and how to move through each part of the process in your classroom. The presenters will show you how students can independently study texts to gain knowledge and will provide you with methods for coaching inquiries to help develop students’ vocabulary and ideas around topics studied.

We can’t wait to see you to read, study, think, learn and play!

Cost

$650/$600 NYC DOE

Where

This institute will be offered online, in real-time via Zoom, and will not be recorded for later distribution. We will accept attendees until the institute has reached capacity.