Natalie Brewer shared this book with her 4th Graders recently. Each page discusses the feet of a different animal and how those feet function to help the animal survive. 

Students then chose an animal and wrote a brief narrative about what their day would be like if they woke up with that animal's feet. 

Another part of the assignment was to use Pages to make a photo that combined their own body with the feet of the animal they were writing about. I modeled the process for them and they were off! Take a look at some of the examples below!

Last week, 10 staff members from Eanes Elementary traveled to Arizona for Solution Tree's Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) at Work Institute. During the day, we attended sessions and Keynotes and each evening we gathered to debrief the day. The conversations during those evenings that the 10 of us had began with questions to use as starting points and quickly developed into wonderful discussions about education in general and the PLC work being done on our campus in specific. 

We are returning to our campus as a Leadership Coalition, armed with in depth knowledge of the PLC process and ready to begin the work of sharing that knowledge with our staff. 

Perhaps the most profound emotional reaction to the conference that I had was the result of the Keynote by Richard Dufour. According to his bio on the Solution Tree site DuFour is...

"A prolific author and sought-after consultant, he is recognized as one of the leading authorities on helping school practitioners implement the Professional Learning Communities at Work™ process in their schools and districts."

In addition, DuFour is dying of lung cancer, a fact that he revealed during his Keynote. He looked frail and frequently had to pause to recover from a coughing spell, yet he continues to travel the United States spreading his passion for the PLC process in spite of the limited time he has left on this earth. Nothing I have heard over the last 5 years of delving into this process has convinced me more that PLCs are worthy of the time and effort that our District is putting into it. Was he paid to be there? Of course! However, I think that all of us could agree that passion is what drives him at this point. He could be at home spending time with family and friends and yet he chooses this rather exhausting life of traveling and speaking and sharing his vast first hand knowledge of the PLC process. My hope for all of us is that we find a passion like DuFour's at some point in our lives. 

Here are the notes that I took during each of the sessions. I used an app called Paper 53 to take notes throughout the conference, not the Sketchnoting app that I generally use, but one that people rave about. I really liked it. The one downside that I found was that you can only add one photo to each page. That could be a perception based on user error and if so and you are reading this and know how to make that happen, please let me know!