Snow in Seattle

So, as if a windstorm wasn't enough, now we get this! It is quite beautiful but I really don't want to be teaching up to the end of June. Also this week, I, along with about 20 other teachers, am taking a workshop entitled G.L.A.D. which is short for Guided Language Acquisition Design (I think that's right). The workshop is being held at our school in one of our 4th grades. It is a group of strategies for enhancing language comprehension and writing. It began primarily as a program for English language learners but they found that it was excellent for improving the vocabulary and comprehension, both oral and written, of all students. It also has cooperative learning and classroom management procedures built right into the teaching strategies. A couple of possible down sides of the program are: there is a lot of teacher prep involved, especially initially and if you don't have sizeable chunks of time with your whole class it might not work as well since the cooperative groups and children learning from each other is central to the strategies. In the morning we watch trainers teach the fourth graders and in the afternoon we debrief and work on making our own materials for our units. My teaching partner and I are working on our Animals unit from our Foss Science kit. We were just rolling right along and getting a whole lot done. Now who knows when they will reschedule the missing day (and possibly days). So that is that.