Mentor Texts PD session

Every fear, every sleepless moment...unnecessary! The PD session went just fine.

On Thursday I gathered together all the Primary French Immersion teachers for my PD session on Mentor Texts. We met at the Board office and after a coffee and some snacks we got down to work.

Once again I have to say our French Immersion teachers are amazing! They were interested and interesting. They had great questions, super ideas and contributed so much to the discussion.

First, we looked back at how this whole TLLP process got started...long, long ago. We then talked about how we are currently using mentor texts in our classrooms and Lucy Calkin's writing curriculum. Teachers shared books that they had had previous success with and their frustrations at finding good quality mentor texts in French. We looked at some sample mentor text lessons plans, frameworks and a video showing Best Practises with Mentor texts.

AND then...I handed out their NEW, SPARKLING mentor texts. Ah the happy looks on their faces! It was worth all the hard work this year. We then broke out into grade level groups and started to work with the texts.

For every mentor text we read through it, put sticky notes in it and wrote lessson ideas. We looked at the French Immersion grammar for each grade level and picked places in the books to stop and teach it. We picked out Inferencing, Predicting, Questioning and Making Connections spots in the books. We considered the teaching foci we would use for writing with each book, including good openings, suspense, creating rime, using dialogue, using pictures to advance the story, "showing, not telling", small moments, non-fiction text elements, word choice and even metaphors and similes. It was so fun to see the teachers happy to get new resources and happy to have time to plan using the new resources.

A few of the mentor texts I choose were a real hit. Everyone was pleased with the poetry and fiction and non-fiction "all about" texts. Harder to find and not as well received were the biography books for Grade 3. Although the teachers remained very kind about the biographical books I chose I knew right away that those books hadn't met their needs. That's okay. I can live with one failure, since I believe that by and large the PD session was a success.

At the end of our PD session we had about 20 minutes. Ever thinking ahead, Cheryl had brought all the resources we needed to write the prompts for Term 3 of our group TLLP project, so we got that done too! Each grade level group wrote their own prompts for round 3, in May.

All in all, I feel pretty good about the outcome of this TLLP project. It has been a long and crazy process, with lots of mistakes, bumps and yes, triumphs too.

Thank you to everyone that helped me to succeed in this journey. This includes my family who put up with piles of books in every corner of our house, hours of Mom reading and working on this project, and a few burnt dinners. (It's really hard to read a book and cook too!)

Now, we "just" have our group project to wrap up.

T Minus 12 hours and counting....

Yes folks. Tomorrow is the day. The day my Mentor text project reaches it's end. I think I hear the music to "Chariots of Fire" playing. You know, the theme music that plays whenever the guy runs in slow motion.

I'm soooooo nervous. And terrrified. Oh and anxious too. I will be leading a full day PD session at the Board office, for the French Immersion teachers, without my sidekicks Cheryl and Francine (cuz it's not their project this time around).

Tomorrow I will ....
either...crash and burn OR passably resemble a competent teacher OR shine like a star.

Wish me luck. And say a prayer.