Elementary Experience

ELEMENTARY FAVORITES:

ELEMENTARY SECTION GET-TOGETHER— Hear from NCTE’s elected leaders who represent the Elementary Section and from the winner of the 2021 Outstanding Elementary Educator Award. Thursday, Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m. ET

CHILDREN’S BOOK AWARDS KEYNOTE

SESSION—The 2021 winners of the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children (Janet Wong), Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children (Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James), and the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children (Jen Bryant and Frank Morrison) will be honored. Then the 2022 award winners will be announced live! Saturday, Nov. 20, 12:30 p.m. ET

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE ASSEMBLY

KEYNOTE SESSION—Sunday, Nov. 21, 9:00 a.m. ET

Teachers of our youngest students will find plenty to explore at #NCTE21.

From incredible authors and illustrators, to the leading experts and innovators in our field, every hour is packed with sessions designed just for you.

WHAT KINDS OF SESSIONS CAN I ATTEND?

Over the course of the Convention, there are more than 150 sessions designated at the elementary level, but you might be surprised at the ideas you can glean from sessions at EVERY level. Here are just a few of the topics: ● Equity in Action: The Power of Reader’s Choice and

Identity ● Pathways to Reading Conversations: Talking with

Young Children about Books ● A Picture[book] Is Worth a Thousand Words:

Using Diverse Picturebooks to Craft Critical

Classrooms

● Children as Language Inquirers: Disrupting English

Only Assumptions in Classroom Contexts ● From Classroom to Community: Social Justice in

Action

WHAT IF I WORK IN EARLY CHILDHOOD? WILL THERE BE SOMETHING FOR ME?

Absolutely! The latest and greatest in early literacy education can be found in more than 30 sessions in the Early Childhood Education strand. These sessions (marked with an icon in the full convention program) are specially curated by the Early Childhood Education Assembly of NCTE and focus specifically on issues and strategies for teaching and advocating for preschool and early elementary-age children.

LITERACIES AND LANGUAGES FOR ALL (LLA)

There’s a strand of sessions at #NCTE21 chosen by leaders of LLA, an NCTE Conference of holistic educators who believe that ALL children deserve personally meaningful learning contexts in which their languages and cultures are valued and recognized as assets for learning. LLA members integrate theories and practices of social justice; critical literacies; digital, multimodal, and biliteracies; and inquiry- and project-based learning that embodies the work of 21st-century educators.