Student Led Conferences

WoW!  This year flew by!  It is hard to believe tomorrow is our last day of school, but it is.  We finished our student led conferences last week and in some ways have struggled a bit to stay focused during our last few days together.  One of the last things students shared with their parents during their conference was "Technology and Summer Learning Opportunities."  One of the options they have is to sign-up to our classroom blog via email to recieve posts from me on Tuesdays and Thursdays over the summer.  My hope is that we can continue to keep our learning community alive and well over the summer using technology.  In an effort to do this I taught my students how to comment on our classroom blog.  I modeled commenting for them and then we practiced. You can check out their comments and our classroom blog by clicking here.  Throughout the summer I plan to post fun, engaging activities that students can try at home.  I am hoping they will try some (if not all) of them and then comment on how the activity turned out. I also let them know they could email me any projects that they do and I will post them on the blog.

Here are a few pictures of our portfolios and the work that we shared during our conferences.



Students created "Wild & Calm" self portraits.  I got this great idea from Art Projects for Kids.




The first pocket has our agenda.  The math section is a "Show What You Know" piece.  Students do the math while their parents watch.  We review before the conference.  I find that some parents have a really hard time allowing their child to do this part without jumping in and taking over though.



This year we created Reading Posters using Glogster EDU. You can check them out by heading to our Classroom Blog and clicking on the "Student-Led Conference" tab at the top.

Next came our writing section.  This year I typed each students September and May writing samples and put them in the front.  I wanted parents to notice the growth their child had made in word choice, sentence structure and content before they looked at their child's spelling and conventions.  Sometimes it is hard to see past the errors.  Next I put the planning sheet from their personal narratives so parents could see the process their child went through to create the story.  Then students showed their published digital version of the story here.  Students also had a non-fiction research piece of writing about dinosaurs and all of the letters they wrote to their parents throughout the school year.