Professional Development Activities

Choose from numerous workshops about Appreciating Diversity, Language, Literacy, Environment, and Best Practice or ask Laurie to custom create a workshop to meet the specific needs of your school and your staff. These workshops are very participatory and typically serve groups of 30 or fewer. Here are just a few of the many topics.

Linking Nutrition to Literacy
Food, fun, and phonological awareness go great together just like peanut butter and jelly. Learn how to use food to support oral language development and print awareness. Learn how to use literacy to support your food-focused activities such as snack, lunch, cooking, and your dramatic play kitchen.

Questioning Techniques
Learn some of the best questions to ask and what makes them so great. Then learn what to do after you have asked those questions. We will discuss the theory and practice of questioning for student learning and questioning for assessment and how important “wait time” is to elicit thoughtful responses from children.

Taking Literacy Outdoors
Don’t abandon your curriculum when you head outdoors. Bring it along with activities that are language-rich and outdoor-friendly. Use the sky the ground and what’s all around to build language skills integrated with gross motor, fine motor, social/emotional, and cognitive skills.

Phonological Awareness
The development of language through songs, rhymes, poems and tongue twisters is not only fun for both child and teacher, but also helps to develop phonological awareness skills critical to success with reading in the early grades.

She gave us so many ways to implement literacy in our classroom.

Dr. Noe also addresses larger groups on topics such as:

	The Importance of Reading Aloud
	Using Storytelling with Parents and Teachers
	Appreciating Diversity through Multicultural Books
	Rhythm, Rhyme and the Sounds of Language