 We had a fabulous time in Vernon. It was thanks to the great group we had and to our facilitator, Penny. So thanks, Penny. I just wanted to... We were really influenced by the work of Allington, of course. But Fay talked so much about that yesterday that we were just going to just skim over that little piece. But what I really liked was the book that we chose to use, and we used it as a book study. And so that was kind of the piece that made things maybe a little different for our school district. We chose Catching Readers Before They Fall. And something that Judy mentioned this morning that really rung true for me was the link between the research, what Allington was saying, what Fay was telling us, and then what was in this book was really powerful. So if you haven't looked at it and you're looking for a great book to support your work, this one really does the trick. Our teachers loved it. So we need the next slide. Oh, wow, that was good. One of the pieces that we spent a lot of time thinking about was every child reading accurately. This brought up all kinds of questions for us around the 98% accuracy and then the balance with choice. And we did talk about that yesterday, but we talked a lot about that with our group as well. And I think it was a conversation that helped everyone deepen their understanding about what are we actually trying to do with the different types of reading that we're doing throughout the day. So we found a huge growth with our students when they worked with books where they were really confident because the kids came to us not particularly liking reading and they left loving reading. So we found that it built self-confidence, a willingness to try strategies and built stamina when we worked with some easier books with them. And that was a very important piece for us. The other piece that worked was really successful was the one around writing about something personally meaningful. We had them writing little books and we got this idea out of catching readers. So they were making little books that the kids helped to write and it was just a lot of fun. And one of the other things that we did was we found some really funny pictures on the internet of animals and put together these funny animal books. And then the children just wrote in their little group, they created a book together. And even though the language that they used was far more sophisticated than what they could read, this was their favorite book to read every time. So we sent these pictures out to all the people in the groups and they all used them and it was a really powerful thing. And the kids just had such ownership on them that they wanted them and we made them eat a copy and they took them home. So that was just a really fun thing that we did. We also looked at every child read something that he or she understands. This made our thinking change to looking at meaning, to read for meaning. And it was funny where we would always interrupt the child. When they started to struggle on a word or sentence, we'd always jump in and give them the strategy that we felt that they needed to use. So we kind of went, okay, Allington says, quit interrupting them, let them read to the bottom of the page. And then we decided we would ask them, did that make sense or really decide? Do you understand what you just read? So we liked that idea, but it was hard for us as teachers just to sit and not say anything. And at one point the student would struggle with the word and I'd go, then they already knew that they'd made a mistake. So we had to sit on our hands and close our mouths and just let that child read through and figure out did they make a mistake, did it make sense and was that okay? Faye brought this queuing system to our attention and I think we'd probably all heard about it before, but I think between what we learned here and what we got out of the book, this really changed our thinking, this MS and V stuff. So it was totally new thinking for some of our teachers and some of us just kind of needed to think about it again. And look more closely at it. So that was something that the book did a really good job on. It helped deepen our understanding of that and helped us realize that not all of our children need to be working on the same strategies and we need to figure out which strategies they need to work on. We had to observe very closely thinking about meaning and the MSV changed the way we did think about that. So we had to start observing very closely. In this way we were able to give our children that immediate feedback that they needed. In fact we had, this is one of our case study students, he didn't have the language to tell us what he was thinking. So we had to really watch closely. Our teacher here was watching his eyes. Where were they? What was he doing? Is he looking at the pictures? Is he rereading? What cues are we seeing? What strategies is he using? And he eventually, at the end of the case study, he was able to articulate what it was that he was doing and what strategies worked for him. I love this whole idea of making all of this a little bit more fun, a little bit more joyful. And some of the things that we were doing was, and another person showed this this morning, or yesterday I'm not sure, but cutting up the sentences and then playing with it, that was a really powerful thing for helping children think about what makes sense and that one around, does this sound right? And then using the magnetic letters helped them really focus on visual cues. So we all learned that we needed to think about our kids as individuals and not have a predetermined lesson plan. So we became more flexible and we started, we moved all of our word work from the beginning of our guided reading lesson plan to the end of our lesson plan so that we were seeing what they were actually doing before we decided what words we were going to focus on and what skills. So that was kind of a neat thing for a nice change that we made. And of course this stuff is all supported in the book that we were reading. And going along with the fun theme, I pulled out markers one day, you can use word markers as well. We did word work right on the tables that we were reading at. So we pulled out a marker and started writing on the table, looking at words that were taken directly from the books that we were reading. So it made the learning more authentic. You can use different colors and for different words. So we were working on compound words this day. And the kids were so excited to go back to their class and say, Mrs. McLaughlin pulled the mark, we wrote on the tables! And I've printed the pictures out and have them up on the wall. And they bring kids into my classroom and they go, look what we were doing. So it just brought a whole lot of fun back into it for them. And then just finally, one of the big things, and of course Sharon talked about this, that we noticed with our group was the engagement and the confidence that changed. And that they actually loved reading afterwards. I remember asking this little boy, when he first came, he hated reading. He told me he hated reading. And when he left, I asked him, and he was just so excited about the books he was reading and how much he loved it. And he recognized the change in himself, so that was really fun. But the other piece that was so important here was that the teachers in our group loved teaching reading. They were so excited and I thought that was a really cool piece to it as well. So thank you. That was our story.