Presentations 

As NIST strives to create a more inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ staff, families, and students, we're taking a moment to consider the discussions taking place within and around our learning spaces as teachers. This session will center on the conversations and reflections I've been engaging in, as well as stories shared by other remarkable teachers in our community.

Led staff PD around the ideas of Science of Reading and how we can make shifts to move away from the 3 cueing method to a program that aligns with the ideas of Structured Word Inquiry. We also focused on ways we can use decodable or "we can read all the words" books in our class to concrete reading knowledge, skills and strategies. 

Focus: Teachers as well as parents of young children.

• Documenting Concepts - Valuing the Whole Child and Their Experiences 

• Service Learning in the Early Years - Exploring Service Identities 

• Building EY Coding Skills - Without the Use of Screens

• The Spectrums of Play - How Play Looks & Feels Across Experiences

Understanding the importance of building Phonemic Awareness.

-Learn about ways to build it into your daily routine
-Activities for your students to practice
-Assessments and next steps

There are many great texts coming out for our younger learners that help us to discuss gender and stereotypes. This session will focus on what we can do beyond engaging them in conversations around these texts. I will share ideas others and myself have used to create rich provocations.

Working collaboratively with Kym Scott and Becky Carlzon to help learners feel empowered, inspired and supported in their desire to make the future of learning more playful.
Learning alongside such speakers as Kath Murdoch, Julie Fisher, Anne van Dam and many others!
My role is to inspire discussions to help others feel welcome to share and reflect on each other's practices.
+Prior to PressPlay I worked with Becky to co-create a STEM quest to inspire and motivate others to find ways they could bring STEM, or up-skill their ideas around STEM in their learning spaces.

Using Seesaw as a formative assessment tool
-Exploring:
- Words have Meaning (Etymology)  
- Bases and Suffixes (Morphology)
- Finding and Circling Phonemes (Orthography)
- Beginning Matrices

Play will forever be a topic of conversation in the early years. Kids are natural inquirers and eager to build and experiment. This workshop will help you look at ways to guide your students play and to help them build their reflection skills. I will then talk about the ways you can make learning and thinking visible by documenting their learning journey so they can see how many skills they are using during their play.

Co-constructed with Sarah Gouge 

Session will focus on ways we can look at play to help make it more interdisciplinary for teachers new to inquiry-based teaching. Examples will be shared to show how we as adults play and construct meaning to help make sense of the world around us, and how we can use those examples to help us guide our teaching. A collection of evidence will be shared to help show teachers multiple ways in which writing, reading, maths, etc are happening in early years play.

This session will focus on learning in the early years (3-7yrs). We will focus on ways we can deepen our students' learning by conferencing with them during their play, just as we do during literacy and math. While also looking at ways to integrate core subjects into their play to help make learning more transdisciplinary. We will look at ways documentation and inquiry cycles can assist students in making their thinking more visible, and become more intentional with their choices. We will be sharing our learning in breakout rooms throughout the chat, helping you to create a future plan for your students.