Just returned from a conference at Purdue with Katie Wood Ray and Kelly Gallagher. They are both such great speakers! The attendance was pretty low but I think they are doing some good things at CLEAR and hopefully will be able to get that conference back to its glory days! Think about attending next year. Next up will be the ISRA which they have moved to September. I hope that many of you can attend! Check and see if you have any PD $$ left and come on downtown to the Hilton. If you have any questions please give me a call and I will see if I can assist you by getting more information.

Happy Summer!!

Wow! What a summer it has been so far! We had an outstanding time at the All-Write Conference in Warsaw this year! Heard some authors I had never had the pleasure of hearing before and sold a ton of books! We then went to New Albany for the Southern Indiana Writing Project conference and had a great time with Georgia Heard. Tim Rasinski was in Columbus so we went there and sold his books. Unfortunately we were not allowed to attend the Department of Education three day conference at the JW. Dr. Rasinski was a speaker there also and I know that many teachers would have liked to purchase the books he talked about. It would be great if someone would put a bug in John Wolf's ear about allowing professional book vendors to attend. He denied us when we asked him. I understand that you probably don't need every publisher there throwing materials at the teachers, but if a distributor of professional books was there, I don't see any harm. Maybe I'm biased?
Anyway, we will be at Purdue next week with Kelly Gallagher. Attendance is really low again this year, so if you haven't signed up you may want to take a look.

We just returned from Brandon, Vermont after attending a sales meeting for Visual Learning Systems. This company creates science videos that are very high quality and are offered in DVD format, online, or can be purchased and streamed into your schools. With the science adoption year finished you may be looking for supplemental materials and these videos would be a great addition to your science curriculum. Go to visuallearningco.com to find out more and then give us a call! By the way, if you have never been to Vermont, it is well worth the trip. Beautiful countryside and very friendly people.

Reading the Learning Connection site I see a lot of chatter about The Daily Five and The Cafe book. Both of those books are published by Stenhouse and I can send you a free preview copy if you are interested. I cannot advertise on Learning Connection, but if you or someone you know would like to see the book, please email me at bvanmol@aol.com.

First Team Education is so pleased to announce that Peggy Eickhoff is now a partner! You may know Peggy from her previous work as a consultant with Houghton Mifflin or Scott Foresman. Most recently she was a sales rep for Sopris West and then Cambium Learning and Voyager. Peggy will be bringing in new business for First Team as Joe and I continue to service our established customers as well as bringing in new. She is already out there working and we know she will be very successful! Welcome Peggy!!!!!!

Amazing that is almost May!!! Some of you may be holding some form of summer school and if you are looking for an easy to use reading intervention program, go to theroadtoreading.com. This is a complete program for students in grades 1-5 that did not master decoding skills at the early levels. And we know that when kids spend all their energy on figuring out a word, comprehension goes down the drain. This program can be administered by teachers or aids. It includes manipulatives, lesson plans, and all for only $495.00 If you are interested, let me know and I will send you a CD to evaluate.

Science Notebooks

First Team Education is offering a workshop on the basics of science notebooks. If you check the science standards, you will see that writing, discussing, organizing, reading are all mentioned over and over. Using science notebooks in your classroom is a perfect way to help meet those needs in science. If you are interested in knowing more, contact us and I will send you the flyer telling you more.