Region 18 Round-Up 2025: Learning Under the West Texas Sun

In this session, we will focus on the importance of the Read Aloud and how listening comprehension leads to reading success in the elmentary classroom. This session will encourage creative extensions for your GT students. 

Ready for students to start developing their own bright ideas? Join "The Lightbulb Lab" where we'll dive into the inspiring story of "Rosie Revere, Engineer" and explore how even "brilliant first flops" can lead to amazing discoveries! Get ready for hands-on inquiry as we tinker with circuits – a tangible way to encourage a growth mindset in your young scientists. Educators will walk away with practical strategies to integrate a growth mindset, STEM, and literacy into their hands-on elementary classroom.  Let's light up learning together!

Unleash gifted minds in a way that brings out creativity through poetry.  Join us as we explore tools to equip students to Read, Analyze, and Create Poems.

Content-Based Instruction (CBI) prioritizes building students' knowledge first, followed by skill development. It encourages active engagement with texts, promoting deeper understanding and critical thinking as students explore and reflect on the content's meaning. Join us as we discuss the effectiveness of this approach in supporting students' overall reading comprehension using specific strategies for gifted learners.

Join us for an exciting and lively vocabulary fiesta designed to jazz up your students' vocabulary knowledge through engaging word experiences. This session promises to be both educational and entertaining, transforming the way you think about words and how you teach them!  

In this session, participants will Analyze the Extended-Constructed Response, Prepare how to have a conversation about the ECR in a way that promotes student engagement, deeper understanding, and a two-way conversation, and Focus a student's efforts on a specific goal that will enable them to take ownership of their writing.

In this session, I would be providing teachers with a visual strategy to help students understand what a controlling idea is and how to get students to memorize the two components required in the controlling idea for an informational text. This will help students understand what their extended constructed response needs to support and will give them a better direction with their essay. This visual will also aid them in constructing a claim required for the argumentative text. Additionally, we will break down what perspective words are and how they are crafted in both essays, and we will also study how these words evolve in STAAR reading question answer choices. Last, I will teach simple words students can use to bring in their explanations of their text evidence.  

Content-Based Instruction (CBI) prioritizes building students' knowledge first, followed by skill development. It encourages active engagement with texts, promoting deeper understanding and critical thinking as students explore and reflect on the content's meaning. Join us as we discuss the effectiveness of this approach in supporting students' overall reading comprehension using specific strategies for gifted learners.

Unleash gifted minds in a way that brings out creativity through poetry.  Join us as we explore tools to equip students to Read, Analyze, and Create Poems.