Brain Research

I recently bought a great book to read - just light reading really, (NOT) entitled Teaching the Brain to Read by Judy Willis, M.D.   It's a great book, highly informative, and as I get into the second chapter, I'm reading aloud since the technical vocabulary about "fMRI" and the "three proposed brain systems and pathways of reading" is challenging MY brain to focus and gain meaning from what I'm reading!  What I find by Chapter 2 is that everything Dr. Willis is writing about - the research-based strategies that she's using in her own classroom (yes, she's also a teacher) - are, though not WBT, part and parcel what Whole Brain Teaching is all about!  It's the research that explains the brain functions that are so wonderfully addressed and taught through Whole Brain Teaching!  I feel like I'm going behind the curtain to see what makes the WBT show a raging success!

So, today I'm in my new classroom, which looks like a bomb went off in the middle of it, and I realize that I've got to go in there on Monday and take a "before" shot so that in a few weeks when whiteboards get moved, furniture gets placed, and stuff's not piled everywhere, I can begin turning it into my best version of our "model classroom," with the power pics wall ready to grow, our rules up and ready to learn and/or practice, and some 5-step lesson plans in place for that first half-week of school.  At one and the same time, there's an urgency to delve into every detail, leaving no bit of potential learning untouched, yet also this realization that August 10th will be here before I've blinked twice, and I need to get on it!!!  Like someone mentioned the other day, I'm even starting to wake up waaayy early for summer vacation, thinking about all I want to accomplish, organize, learn, study, and prepare for my new class.  And Whole Brain Teaching is right smack in the center of it all!