by Anna Gratz Cockerille
In classrooms across the country, a sense of celebration is building. The feelings of joy and pride that come at the culmination of an entire year of daily hard work and dedication are unmistakable. This is is a time for a slight loosening of the reins, a time to reflect upon how far you and your students have come. It’s a time to enjoy the ease of routines you worked so hard to put into place, to watch students putting into practice the skills you’ve helped them to hone over and over.
To be sure, along with this spirit of celebration comes the sense that the work is done. Many students seem to move into summer mode weeks (or months) before the summer is actually upon them. As teachers, our job, then, is to infuse the spirit of celebration with a sense of purpose, a sense that there is work left to be done in order for each student to truly become the best selves they are capable of being before the year ends.
One way to keep students working with purpose until the very end of the school year while also maintaining the joy that comes with this time of year is to focus them on a culminating celebration, perhaps one that combines both reading and writing. A culminating celebration should be a grand affair, one that feels different from other celebrations held throughout the year. School-wide celebrations are exciting for all and are not as difficult to organize as one might imagine. Here are a few examples:
Getting ready for any of these celebrations would require the kind of reflection, focus, and preparation that will keep students engaged right up to the end of the school year.
At this week’s Twitter Chat, Reading and Writing Project Staff Developer Meghan Hargrave will lead a chat on ways to make sure the last months of the school year have big payoff. Join her and the TCRWP community to share ways to finish out the year with a sense of accomplishment and joy, while still keeping engagement and learning high.
Anna was a teacher and a literacy coach in New York City and in Sydney, Australia, and later became a Staff Developer and Writer at TCRWP. She served as an adjunct instructor in the Literacy Specialist Program at Teachers College, and taught at several TCRWP institutes, including the content literacy institute, where she helped participants bring strong literacy instruction into social studies classrooms. Anna also has been a researcher for Lucy Calkins, contributing especially to Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement (Heinemann 2012), and Navigating Nonfiction in the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Grades 3–5 series (Heinemann 2010). Most recently, Anna served as an editor for the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, K–5 series.