Donna Lowe Blog for November on Conferencing

Conferencing with my students has become such a important part of each day.  If it is missed for some reason, I just feel out-of-sorts.  What is really great is getting to spend that little bit of extra time with those kids in my focus group.  One day this week I concentrated solely on my focus group. What I found was that those students have made many more gains with their reading than I thought.  That was a great surprise!  It also made me aware that I need to keep challenging them so that they continue to progress.
Each day I begin my conferencing time with a mini-lesson from one of my Beanie Babies.  Yes, Beanie Babies-the stuffed animals.  For example, Questioning Owl helps remind my students to stop and ask themselves questions as they read.  Chunky Monkey teaches my students how to look for the "chunks" (little words in big words, consonant blends, endings) in words to decipher the word.  My favorite beanie baby example/lesson is with Skippy Frog.  Skippy Frog helps me teach my students what to do when they come to a word that they don't know and can't seem to chunk.  Just today, one of my students used that strategy so well with his Clifford book.  I filled out his conferencing bookmark with encouragement to keep on using the Skippy Frog strategy.  My students relate well to stuffed animals, as most six and seven year olds do.  When it is their turn to get to spend the independent reading time in the corner reading center, they get to hold the stuffed animals while they read.  I see them back there holding those animals while reading and sometimes reading to the animals. 
Conferencing is kind of an emotional time.  It's a time to connect with my students.  I try to remember what it felt like to read to my teacher when I was little, and actually how intimidating it can be.  First-graders do not want to be wrong.  They don't like to make mistakes. They want their teacher to be proud of them.  So, I take the opportunity of conferencing to build them up with their reading.  I always show them something that I noticed that I am really proud of.  I always give them a goal to work towards.
Conferencing has become very rewarding to me, my students, and especially my focus group.  I see this time as extremely beneficial and now I don't know what I would do without it! I don't know how I taught for so many years without doing it. It makes me sad to think that I might have missed out on learning something really important about my students as readers when I didn't conference on a regular basis.  I'm thankful to have learned this important part of teaching.