It’s summertime and the learnin’ is easy. If you are a music person, you surely recognize my reference to the lyrics from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. I am a music person, but I am also a summer person. I really like to take advantage of the more relaxed pace during the summer. I like to use the summer to reset my creative engine, enhance skills that I have been using, learn new and exciting things, and lastly, challenge myself on what I would like to accomplish with my students and clients next year.

Learning Without Tears has many opportunities that you can take advantage of over the summer months. We have five professional development workshops for you to choose from including: Pre-K readiness and writing workshops,  Pre-K literacy and math workshops, K-5 handwriting workshops, and handwriting assessment workshops to broaden and expand your knowledge base. During the summer, we offer midweek workshops that may fit into your schedule better and leave your weekend time free for family and friends. We also offer a virtual keyboarding workshop, so you don’t even have to travel away from your home. In addition, we have free webinars online. Whether the topic is readiness, handwriting, or keyboarding, these webinars are designed to give you tips, techniques, and implementation strategies.

If you choose to attend one of our face-to-face workshops, I have some tips to share on how to get the most out of the training, as well as how to prepare for the workshop. First, bring your past experience to the workshop, but also bring an open mind! I often share with others that “the only way to get ten years of experience is to teach or practice for ten years.” In my opinion, if we do the same things every year, we only have one year of experience because we continue to do the same thing. Think about this: we need to be constantly and continually adding to our knowledge base as a teacher, therapist, or specialist. So come to the workshops with an open mind to not only try new things, but to view the challenges and the goals in a different way so that we can help all students and clients to succeed.

My second thought has to do with preparation before attending one of our workshops. I suggest really analyzing what you want your students to accomplish in the area of written communication. Examine your benchmarks, objectives, and goals. Determine whether you are meeting those at the highest level. Decide whether there are specific areas where you may have concerns, and come to the workshop seeking new information and new ways to meet the handwriting, keyboarding, and educational needs of your students.

So, hopefully, you grabbed hold of some “tips that were jumpin’.” This is so important because, as we all know, the “stakes are really high” (I couldn’t help but add a couple more Gershwin references). In all seriousness, the stakes are high in what we need to teach to our students, and they are high in what they need to learn. They are also high in terms of all the things your students can accomplish, and the places they may go with our help and guidance. Let’s all work to encourage our students and help them develop their written communication skills so they exude both competence and confidence.