Teach Literacy Like a Dream

Encourage students to set and achieve life goals, and improve text and visual literacy skills. The Legacy Project and the Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) are offering a cross-curricular workshop for teachers, counselors, and media specialists working with students in the elementary and middle grades.

Using her award-winning picture book Dream: A Tale of Wonder, Wisdom & Wishes, educator and author Susan V. Bosak will lead an inspirational, idea-filled session.

Dream has won 11 national awards, among them an International Reading Association Children's Choice and a Teachers' Choice. Fifteen top illustrators – including two-time Caldecott Medal winners Leo and Diane Dillon, Raúl Colón, and Shaun Tan – have each created a gorgeously illustrated page to complement a multilayered, poetic story about life's hopes and dreams from childhood to adulthood. Says The Bloomsbury Review, "Richly crafted and thoughtfully written, Dream is a dazzling project."

You'll experience a multimedia reading of the story. Then, after a "big picture" review of the top ten findings from literacy research, Susan will share classroom-tested lesson ideas using Dream as a model. Help students build an understanding of meanings found in words and pictures (lesson ideas support the Standards for the English Language Arts), of themselves, and of the world. Get ideas for written text and visual literacy, and skill building – meaning, interpretation, inference, cross-curricular connections, and more.