Mary Anne Buckley




Mary Anne Buckley has over twenty-five years of experience in early childhood education. She is also the youngest of six siblings from a loving and goofy family. “We shared intellectual, creative, and social highs and lows around the dining room table every night. It was the first Friendship Workshop.”

Mary Anne attended Vermont College to learn how to write children's books. "I love the power picture books have to explore, illuminate, and strengthen our connection to each other.  I soon realized how much I wanted to be a direct partner with children as they discovered the joys of learning.”  She went on to combine her education with her personal meditation practice to help children become more aware—aware of reading strategies, aware of math solutions, aware of the world around them and within them. "We all have an inner voice telling us a story of how our life is going. Becoming aware of that voice, and discerning when it helps us and when it limits us, is vital to social, emotional, and academic success."

Mary Anne lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York and teaches kindergartners and first-graders in her multi-age classroom.

Mary Anne Buckley

Twitter: @ma_buckley

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1 product
Sharing the Blue Crayon
Sharing the Blue Crayon
Mary Anne Buckley
Paperback
$33.33 $25.00 Save $8.33
Mary Anne Buckley:::100172

Sharing the Blue Crayon

9781625310118

$33.33 $25.00 Save $8.33
Social and emotional learning is at the heart of good teaching, but as standards and testing requirements consume classroom time and divert teachers’ focus, these critical skills often get sidelined. In Sharing the Blue Crayon, Mary Anne Buckley shows teachers how to incorporate social and emotional learning into a busy day and then extend these skills to literacy lessons for young children. Through simple activities such as read-alouds, sing-alongs, murals, and performances, students learn how to get along in a group, empathize with others, develop self-control, and give and receive feedback, all while becoming confident readers and writers.
 
As Buckley shares, “Every day we ask young children to respectfully converse, question, debate, and collaborate about literature, science, math problems, history, and more. That’s sophisticated stuff and requires sophisticated skills. Social and emotional skills are essential to helping children communicate their knowledge and articulate their questions. We must teach students how to build respectful, caring classroom communities, where students are supported and fully engaged in the learning and everyone can reach their potential.”
 
In this fresh and original book, Buckley captures the humor, wonder, honesty, and worries of our youngest learners and helps teachers understand how to harness their creativity and guide their conversations toward richer expressions of knowledge. Teachers of special populations will especially appreciate Buckley’s successful strategies for reaching English language learners and children from high-poverty homes who may not have strong foundations for academic discourse.
 
As Buckley reminds us, “By understanding one another—orally and socially at first, then using those community-building exchanges to strengthen the skills of reading and writing—we experience the authentic pride and sweet joys of learning, understanding, and connecting to one another.”
Sharing the Blue Crayon