This past week the Choice Literacy video crew was filming at a school in Dublin, Ohio, where Principal Karen Szymusiak has built a wonderful learning community among the teachers. I asked Karen to define the most important thing she does as a principal to support literacy, and she replied, "I give teachers time for conversations. I know everything is rushed, and we're expected to do so much, and that's why it's my job to carve out opportunities for everyone to chat with each other about literacy in an unhurried way." That's exactly what we saw in our two days at the school - lots of thoughtful, comfortable, and honest conversations about how children learn to read and write. We'll be posting many of these discussions in the coming months at the site.

Karen's words made me realize again the most important thing most literacy leaders do - we slow down the clock, helping teachers to pause and take time to think about their work. When the thinking can be done aloud, with colleagues who respect your words, that's when a thriving literacy community is born. I like the quote from Wayne Dyer that describes what we're after: "We are in a partnership with all other human beings, not a contest to be judged better than some and worse than others." How can we teach this to children in this frantic testing era, if we don't have time to learn it from each other?

If you're starting to think through plans, activities, and goals for professional development next year, you can't go wrong by putting time for conversations among colleagues about literacy at the top of your list - slow, unhurried, respectful chatter about what you all value the most in literacy learning, and how you can help each other realize those values together.

And if the close of the school year is starting to feel just a bit over-the-top-how-can-we-possibly-accomplish-all-we-need-to crazy, then maybe there's an opportunity now to experience the power of slowing down the clock. Is there any event you could cancel sometime in the next few weeks, a meeting that isn't essential, a staff activity that might be replaced with a gift of an hour to your colleagues? Ask them to pause together and think about what they most want to celebrate from their students' literacy learning this year. A pot of coffee, a plate of fresh cookies or fruit, and an opening of thanks for all the good things that have happened in literacy this year to begin the chat may be the best gift you can give your colleagues late in the school year.

This week, we've got some terrific web resources for vocabulary learning, plus more as always. Enjoy!

Brenda Power

Editor, Choice Literacy

www.choiceliteracy.com

Free for All

Wouldn't it be great if someone created an online game that builds student vocabulary in a way that has kids clamoring to play? And wouldn't it be great if we could solve the problem of world hunger? Free Rice combines these two worthy (if disparate) goals. Each word defined correctly builds your tally of grains of rice donated to poor communities, and the game is designed to scale the difficulty of the words up or down depending on your responses. This features allows students of almost any age or ability to enjoy it. You can give the game a test run at this link:

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Mary Lee Hahn explains how she uses Free Rice with her students to teach specific literacy skills and motivate students to learn words. Her articles includes details on two additional free web-based games for vocabulary building:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/590.cfm

The Map My Word tool is a great free gadget to add to your computer desktop, or student computers in your classroom. It was designed by the folks who created the nifty VocabGrapher and Visual Thesaurus, and any writer will find it instantly addictive:

http://www.mapmyword.com/

Join us this summer in Oregon, Ohio, or Maine for this summer's Choice Literacy Workshops. Featured presenters include Aimee Buckner, Karen Szymusiak, "The Sisters," Franki Sibberson, Jennifer Allen, Ruth Shagoury, and Andie Cunningham. All participants receive DVDs to use in study groups or staff meetings back home:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/department22.cfm

For Members Only

If you enjoyed Karen Terlecky's recent video of a sentence observation with her 5th grade students, you'll appreciate her feature this week detailing the assessments and preparation that goes into the design of her sentence observation program. We've included a catch-up link if you missed the video example of a sentence observation:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/578.cfm

Gail Boushey and Janet Cook are two literacy coaches who share responsibilities at a school in Kent, Washington. In this week's video, they talk about their collaboration and vision for supporting teachers and students:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/562.cfm

Finally, from the Choice Literacy Archives, Franki Sibberson provides a booklist of children's literature for word work in "Playing with Word Work: Inviting Children to See Playful Language in Books":

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/156.cfm

That's all for this week!