24th Annual CELL Literacy Conference

The Annual CELL Literacy Conference is my favorite event MSMC hosts each year. This year the keynote speaker was Susan L. Roth. She is the author and illustrator of over 50 books. When she started her talk she didn't say a word. We just watched in awe as she took different fabrics, papers and scraps and transformed it into a beautiful image. I am someone who loves art and watching her really inspired me because you don't need expensive materials you can make beautiful pictures using the bare minimum and that is exactly what Susan does in her books. She then went on showing all different images from her books that she has created. One of my favorites was from her book Parrots Over Puerto Rico. The vibrant shades of blues and greens really stood out to me and her ability to capture such a beautiful bird using just paper was amazing. This form of turning scraps into pictures is called collaging and it is something I look forward to trying in the future. Susan spoke about how she was inspired to write some of her books and spoke of her passion for traveling. Many of her books take place in countries outside the United States.

After the keynote, we went straight to our first workshop. The workshop I attended was: Stories of “3” Come to Life. This geared towards early childhood grades and I enjoyed it very much. As someone who is going to school to be an early childhood educator I have read my fair share of The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and The Three Bears and The Three Billy Goats Gruff stories. There are so many different versions and so many different activities you can do with these stories. One activity I particularly liked was changing the ethnicity of Goldilocks. When you change Goldilocks' ethnicity you also change the clothing she is wearing, the type of food she tries eating, the style of the home she goes into and so much more. I think this activity is great for students of all different ethnicities to make connections to the character of the book.

The second workshop I went to was: Full STEAM into Reading: An After School Library Program. This workshop focused on different activities that make a connection between science and literacy. Some of the activities included spice painting, story jenga, crystal trees and exploring colors. Each science activity was paired with a book. My favorite station was the crystal trees station. Here you were given the necessary materials to make a crystal tree. The activity was paired with Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. If I were to do this with a class I would first read them the story and talk about the importance of conserving our trees, then talk with the students to see what they can do to help our environment. As a closing activity we would "grow" our own indoor crystal tree. The class would then be asked to draw their own picture of the tree and write a story based on if we had crystal trees instead of green trees like we do now.