Coastal Savannah Writing Project

Are you seeking a terrific way to spend your summer break?  

Here in Savannah, Georgia you can go to Tybee Island everyday or visit places in Savannah that you never visited before.  You might tour the squares to learn Savannah’s history.  You might tour Wormsloe or Fort Pulaski to glimpse Revolutionary War times.  There are museums and markers everywhere.

You can revisit some places too.  So much history, dining, and entertainment here cannot be fully appreciated with just one or two visits.  

All that is fun and wonderful, but if you are a teacher, there is professional development waiting for you here that is fun, engaging, rigorous, and transformative.

You can always carve two weeks out of your summer break and learn how to teach your students to love writing, to craft writing, and to become writers.  

You can sign up for the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and become a fellow.  Leslie Roessing (the “o” is silent), who is a published author in the field of writing instruction, leads the project.  Leslie, Donna, and Heidi modeled the "I do/We do/You Do" teaching method.  They demonstrated for us how to engage students in better reading comprehension through writing activities.

And such activities!

I learned technologies such as voki, animoto, and extranormal that can be used to communicate with students in an engaging way.  Our darlings may tune us out, but they cannot take their eyes and ears off of our avatars.

We practiced freewriting, double entry journals, reformulations, cartooning, and other strategies: several a day in fact, that can be implemented into instruction.  I will be writing about these strategies in the coming posts as the new school year approaches.

We were introduced to lots of resources: authors, web sites, and articles.

If you love writing, or you despise it--as some of my classmates dared to admit at the beginning--your instruction will be transformed.  If you are a writer, you will learn ways to expand your creativity and practice your craft.  

It has been the best two weeks of professional development I ever experienced.  I would not be writing this blog had I not attended the Coastal Savannah Writing Project.

For more information, go to the url below:

http://www.armstrong.edu/Education/coastal_savannah_writing_project/cswp_welcome