Writing Conferences

This year my school has adopted Lucy Calkin's Units of Study for Writing. Although I did teach her previous K-2 Units these new units feel a bit foreign to me. It could be because I taught the old units YEARS ago, it could be that she has added so much more to these new units, but its probably a bit of both.

Either way, I am very excited to be using this program again and am amazed at the progress I have already seen in my students as we make our way through the units.

Yes, my students are learning to write rich narratives, fact filled informative books, and persuasive opinion pieces! But I am also learning. Everything from how to hold a short yet effective mini lesson, engage in a purposeful conference, to holding a powerful mini-group. 

Today, I just want to talk about what I've been doing in the realm of conferencing. I've gotten pretty good at finding a compliment for my students, but I'm having a more difficult time with leaving them with a teaching point. To help, I have been referring back to the If . . . Then . . .Curriculum book a lot! If you haven't explored it yet, Calkins has so nicely laid out some typical "hiccups" students encounter within each unit. She provides the teaching language to help move students forward and goes as far as giving examples of short notes you can leave them with. So . . .here's where my ah-ha came in. I wanted to have those notes quickly accessible so my students could keep them on their goal sheet as a reminder of our conference's teaching point. But I don't have time to dry each one out and I don't have the money to print them all up on expensive labels. Therefore, I began seeking out a more timely and cost effective way to leave "tracks" behind my conferences. I decided to create a document where I could print those goals onto post-its. Now I keep them with me and just pull one off when I need it and stick it right to the student's goal page. Here is an example of my first draft coming out of the printer.

Since then, I've made some tweaks to the document and it seems after day 1 - I can say I think it's working BEAUTIFULLY!  So far I have only made the post -it notes for the informational unit, but I plan on making these for the narrative and opinion units as well once I get to them. I'm making two sets. One of them has the problem statement on the top and the other doesn't. You can pick them up at my TPT store - free for a limited time!

Here's what I did:
In my writing conference folder I printed out the pages from the  If . . . Then . . .Curriculum and just stuck the post-its that matched in the last column. I made sure to print multiple copies of each post-its.

Happy Conferencing!