Several years ago if you asked me about conferencing, I would have said "Yes, I do writing conferences all the time." But I never did reading conferences. Yes, my students read to me, but it wasn't a deliberate time of instruction with a small group of kids or individuals. My entire reading instruction has evolved so much through the years. Now I thoroughly enjoy my reading conference times with my kids. We conference so much for a variety of reasons, that we made an anchor chart about rules for conference time. Not only do I conference in my guided reading group for READ WELL but I also do conferencing during literacy centers when they read with me and during independent reading time. My students who are in my focus group go to RTI. They are fortunate to get several small group reading times throughout the day. One of my students in my focus group is also in my READ WELL group, so I get to conference with him about 4 times a week. I like to conference with my focus group about 3 times a week in different settings. I have really been able to get to know them as readers but also as great little people:) One of the main things I see in all of the students in my focus group is that they desperately want to read high interest text. But as we all know that is hard finding high interest books for struggling readers. But I feel that I have been able to do that. By getting to know them, I know their interests and have searched high and low for books for them. So now they love our conferencing time whether it is in small group or individually. So now that they have books that they enjoy reading, I can target the skills they really need to work on.
All of the kids in my focus group have a great sight word vocabulary, but if you add a suffix to a sight word, they had no idea what to do. So I have been spending time with them discussing the "chunking" strategy where they find a word they know inside of another word (like in likes). This has helped them tremendously. Prior to that small group instruction, they would either make up a nonsense word or just skip it. They were unable to see the relationship of base words and suffixes. Being able to "chunk" a word has helped their fluency as well. We will continue working on chunking and our next step is looking at ending punctuation. They read every sentence the same way, not paying attention to the ending. So we are practicing reading all kinds of different sentences with different expressions and body movements!!
Some days are more frustrating than others. But just recently as I was doing a miscue analysis with a little girl in my focus group, I knew all the hard work had been worth it. She picked a high interest book to read to me. I thought it was probably a little harder of a text than what she could read, but it was her choice. She read it to me without one error or self-correction!! She even read the labels on the food dishes and told me that they were called labels and it said who the dish belonged to. I could have cried. She amazed me. It was an high interest text for her,but she also put into place everything she learned during conference time and other small group reading times. Conferencing time is a critical time in my classroom that guides my instruction for all my students.
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