TKG Book Club #2

Our Book club is open to the community! We gather around a book, every other month, to deepen our understanding of our selves, our families and our school.

This month, we are reading CHOICE WORDS by Peter Johnston (buy it from the Amazon link on our home page and a percentage will be donated to the school). We will meet on Tuesday, November 19th at 7pm at a family residence. Please register!

In productive classrooms, teachers don't just teach children skills: they build emotionally and relationally healthy learning communities. Teachers create intellectual environments that produce not only technically competent students, but also caring, secure, actively literate human beings.

Choice Words shows how teachers accomplish this using their most powerful teaching tool: language. Throughout, Peter Johnston provides examples of apparently ordinary words, phrases, and uses of language that are pivotal in the orchestration of the classroom. Grounded in a study by accomplished literacy teachers, the book demonstrates how the things we say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for what children learn and for who they become as literate people. Through language, children learn how to become strategic thinkers, not merely learning the literacy strategies. In addition, Johnston examines the complex learning that teachers produce in classrooms that is hard to name and thus is not recognized by tests, by policy-makers, by the general public, and often by teachers themselves, yet is vitally important.

We will also discuss how this comes alive in the school setting and in our community.

All are welcome to join and invite friends!

Our next book club will meet on February 20th. Stay tuned for details!