Fall Fare

Last week I was privileged to be able to attend Fall Fare. Fall Fare is a conference put on by ATEQ, the Association of Teachers of English of Quebec. While Springboards, ATEQ's flagship spring conference, is all about grassroots presenters from Quebec, Fall Fare is about bigger names, people you may have heard of before.

This year, Georgia Heard gave a keynote about using poetry throughout the year to teach students to fall in love with language and words. This reminded me of how rich poetry really is for language development. I try to d a poem a day, but it always seems to peter out by this point in the year. Since my students are largely french-mother-tongue, I need to seize every opportunity to inject vocabulary and rich language into out day. I need to get back on track with a poem a day, it is important.

Miriam Verberg gave a great talk about game design. She pointed out how much writing actually goes into video games. I wonder if some of my reluctant writers, especially the boys, would get excited about writing if it was the scenario for a video game. Couple that with one of the tools she showed that allows them to create a choose-your-own-adventure type story online, and we may have a winning recipe. Looking forward to giving it a try.