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This totally interactive session will star YOU. We are impressed daily with the creativity, imagination and sensitivity of the teams doing R.E.A.D. all over the country. We keep hearing amazing new ideas and solutions, and we want everyone who attends the conference to get a chance to hear them, too. Come prepared to share your best, most innovative ideas from your R.E.A.D.ing experiences. We’ll have a fast-paced format (three minutes each!) so we can hear from as many people as possible. We’ll all have our pens poised throughout—don’t miss this chance to shine while inspiring your colleagues!
 

The ITA survey about this first R.E.A.D. conference revealed that handlers want to understand more about children’s reading. This session, conducted by a college professor who teaches reading and writes college textbooks on reading methods, will demonstrate some of the difficulties encountered by children as they struggle to make sense out of print, explain how the process of learning to read works, and provide a new R.E.A.D. booklist that designates the reading levels of books. Get practical suggestions for making the most of those 15 minutes when working with an individual child during a R.E.A.D. session in a library or school.

Have you wished you could look at a puppy and know if it would be a good fit for you and your family? Would you like to better understand what your dog is conveying to you as you go through your everyday life together? Learn what yawning, lip licking and eye blinking mean. Do you understand the significance of high and low tail carriage? Is direct eye contact meaningful? Our animals ‘talk’ to us every day in a myriad of ways. Learn to interpret your pet’s body language and better understand how to convey what you want your pet to know. This course is about learning to evaluate a puppy’s—or an older dog’s— intelligence, spirit, and willingness to work with human beings.
 

1:00 pm to 2:30 pm

How important is nutrition in the canine world? Are the benefits of premium dog foods all they’re cracked up to be? What about the BARF (bones and raw food) diets? What if you don’t have time to cook for your dog? The latest scoop on what you’re scooping into your dog’s bowl. Lots of practical information, some lively discussion and fun, too—these two vets don’t necessarily agree on all these topics!

Come on, admit it—you were smitten when you saw the dogs on the R.E.A.D. training video demonstrate their “reading skills.” Your dog can do it, too! Come and learn how to get your dog to do those amazing things, along with general principles you can use to learn anything else that you’d both enjoy doing. The ‘secrets’ of dog training will be discussed and demonstrated. 
 

What role does motivation play in learning to read and how does the R.E.A.D. program work to build readers’ engagement with the task of reading? This session explores the dynamics of motivation, the logic behind incentives to read, ways that R.E.A.D. volunteers can involve parents and families in the process, and brief surveys that can be used with parents and children to assess the R.E.A.D. program’s impact.
 

B3:  "Supporting the Bereaved on the Journey of Grief" - Shirley Rossa, MSW, LCSW 

Grief is part of life. All of us will experience grief at some time during our lives and, as therapy teams, we see our clients going through it frequently. However, our culture does a poor job preparing us to deal with our own losses or to support another in the journey of grief. This session will explore the different ways grief is manifested, healthy ways grief can be expressed, as well as things to say and not say to another who is grieving.