Connecting Preschool and Primary in Massachusetts and Teaching Suburban ELLs for Manhattanville College

This has been a busy week for me. I met with many teachers at a conference hosted by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The focus was on how to connect instruction across the preschool and primary grades. I tried to connect the work of the National Early Literacy Panel and the National Reading Panel, and had a good time doing it. Massachusetts does such a great job in education, and this is just another example of their leadership. It was sure fun to be included.

Then later in the week I gave a talk about the results of the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth at Manhattanville College in Rye, NY. This conference was getting at something pretty important: the big cities are shedding a lot of their minority and poverty populations. If those kids are pushed out of the city, where do they go? To the suburbs, of course, and for many of those teachers it is a whole new thing. Again, I was honored to take part.

If anyone has any use for the powerpoints from these presentations you can find them online here. Feel free to download.

http://sites.google.com/site/shanahanstuff/this-week-march-2010