Press Here

A week or so ago Mary Lee at A Year of Reading reviewed the book Press Here by Herve Tullet.  I was immediately drawn to the book and the imagining it inspired.  I ordered the book with some Boarders gift cards that needed to be used up and I was more impressed in person.  Each page has a task "causes" a reaction on the next page.  I found myself getting excited to see what would happen to the dots next.  The text is simple but the creativity is powerful.  I can't wait to see my kindergartners faces as the pages change.

Conferring Part III Reflection: It's time to start ploughing

Thanks again to Cathy Mere, Laura Komos, and Jill Fisch for hosting this wonderful book chat.  This is some of the best professional development I've participated in.  If you are interested in the entire conversation visit Cathy's Jog where she has brilliantly compiled all of the posts.

Part III of Patrick Allen's book Conferring: The Keystone of Reader's Workshop was a bittersweet ending for me.  I am so excited about everything that I have learned but also sad to see it end.  Patrick's writing made me feel like we were sitting together and he was slowly and methodically explaining me to why and how I could confer with my own students.  Like the conferences in his classroom he nudged me along, showing me real conferences, showing me his notes and then explaining how that would translate in my own room.  Unlike his classroom, he did all of the talking and I did a whole lot of listening.  He anticipated my questions and answered them promptly.  He addressed my concerns about fitting this into a mandated format of teaching and reminded me to keep mints always handy. 

I'm thankful to have learned and read this book with so many people who are more experienced and smarter than me.  I know that I can go to them if I start "drowning".  My PLN has expanded so much through this experience.  Thanks to all of you.

I've been thinking a lot about how I'm going to implement conferring into my class and how when asked, I will explain my reasoning.  I'm going to need to start slow and remember that this isn't a race.  Take it day by day and make sure that the time is never compromised.  This is going to be a challenge but as I've heard before "You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind." -Author Unknown.  It's time to get in there get started and see where this journey takes me and my readers.

Conferring Part II Reflection

I just finished Part II of Conferring: The Keystone of Reader's Workshop by Patrick Allen.  Thank you to Cathy Mere, Laura Komos, and Jill Fisch for hosting this wonderful book chat.  I probably wouldn't have read this book had I not seen all the talk about it on Twitter.
I started this a little late so my first post came after most everyone had posted their second post.  I wonder what you were thinking as I grappled with the idea of conferring in kindergarten.  You already knew what I'd discover when I read the second part. The first part didn't have me convinced that I could do this in K.  What would it look like? What do I say?  Thankfully Part II cleared a lot of things up for me.

In this part of the book Patrick gets into the nuts and bolts of conferring.  The first thing he talks about is his RIP model for conferring.  This makes so much sense to me!  I like that there is a structure for every conference.  Kindergartners need structure and need to know what to expect.  I definitely think that the P part will be the part I will need to focus my thinking on. 

Next he talks about organizing your notes.  I'm just getting ready to start my third year of teaching and I can name at least 5 different ways I've tried to organize notes so far.  I laughed when Patrick talked about the computer labels, I can imagine myself with labels stuck or piled everywhere.  I won't be trying that.  I will have an iPad in my classroom this year and I think that using a program like Evernote will help keep me organized.  I also plan on recording my conferring so that I can revisit what I talked about with the student to add to my notes and also improve upon what I'm doing.  The idea of not having paper either in a binder or folder laying around is very appealing to me.  Hopefully this is the system that works for me.

I like that he talks about "conferring vs collecting".  I am guilty of having a lot of stuff about kids without any rhyme or reason to it.  I also have a lot of "the D word" (data) from district assessments and "snapshots" taken of children.  Adding conferring notes as another piece of data will guide my teaching and also help me better reflect on my children and their needs.

I loved that Patrick went into great detail about three of his conferences.  I felt myself wanting to know what happened next with these three children.  Did Haley learn to balance her note taking?  What did Cole think about Ida's mom?  What was Jaryd's next book choice and how did he know it was right for him?  Then it dawned on me that these are the typed of conversations I can be having with my kids and I'll be there for the next conference to know how they grow and learn. 

I already know that doing the right about of listening will be a challenge for me.  It's something that my literacy coach and I have been working on when I ask questions during other parts of my day.  It will be easy to keep this in the fore front of my mind since it's already something I'm conscious of.

As I was reading I was wondering to myself about reading every book in my classroom library.  Most of the books I've purchased myself but there is a good number that were left for me or purchased for me when I started.  Patrick answered my question before I could ask it.  He says that you don't have to read every book in your library and to use those conferences as a "lets figure this out together" time.  I'm so glad he said that, I was starting to panic over having to read that many books all of a sudden.

I stopped when Patrick talked about Deborah Meier and her view that kindergarten is "the one place--maybe the last place--where teachers are expected to know their children well".  I feel like I really know my kids, I spend a lot of time making sure that I get each and every one of them but why in the world have I not been getting to know them as readers?!?!  This was like a light bulb but also made me feel guilty.  If I wasn't convinced before this was the last nail I needed to make sure that conferring becomes a priority in my classroom this year. 

I couldn't be happier that I joined this book blog chat about conferring.  I have looked at teaching in ways that I've never done before.  Now I'm off to read everyone's responses to Part II.

Conferring Reflection Part I: Changing Misconceptions

This summer I joined Twitter as a way to interact and learn from other people who care about the education of children as much as I do.  I had no idea how much I would learn from these amazing people, but that is for another post. A couple of weeks ago Cathy Mere, Laura Komos, and Jill Fisch decided to host #cyberPD.  It was going to be an online book club about Patrick Allen's  book Conferring: The Keystone of Reader's Workshop.  I saw post after post about it and thought about the stack of books I already wanted to read, my vacation would interfere with 2 scheduled posting days and for heaven's sake I teach kindergarten how is this going to apply to me.  My curiosity won and even though I joined late I'm reading and posting about my thinking that went along with Part 1 of this book.

I teach kindergarten and this year we are changing our schedule, I will see my students 5 full days over two weeks time.  I think there are lots of good things that come from this and also some challenges.  My students range from not being able to identify any letters to being able to read simple texts.  I'll be very honest conferring about reading with kindergartners had never crossed my mind.  I teach small guided reading groups of emergent readers with the constant pressure of seeing every group as often as possible. 

I still feel this model of instruction is essential to my emergent readers in helping them become readers but Patrick is making me see the importance of one-on-one time with each reader.  Even if my kids cannot read the word in the books they are choosing they can still learn from the pictures and gain knowledge and strategies about text.  I still have a lot to think about and hopefully the next two parts of the book will help me think more clearly about how to implement this important part of my day.

Here are some things that I connected with in Part I

• "Conferring is an art"-Thank goodness because it is a  very scary endeavor to take on, especially if I think I have to master it in the first try.
• I have had and heard many of Patrick's list of "misconceptions".  I reread them over and over to rethink and train my brain.
• Patrick continually uses the word "nudging" to describe a conference.  Although I know better it's sometimes difficult not to go into a conference (writing conference in my experience) with a fire hose trying to fix everything at once. 
• Patrick also talks about how there is no quick fix for reader's workshop.  He describes the fancy packaging and tempting catch phrases that publishers use to hook you into the idea fixing your teaching in a few quick steps.  If fire hoses don't work for children they aren't going to work for our teaching.

I'm also wondering about how to balance the small group and individual time with my kids.  Mandy at Enjoy and Embrace Learning has the same worries about this that I do.

Red-Eyed Tree Frog

I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting non-fiction books to add to my classroom library.  Kindergartners love anything with photos, especially with animals.  I picked up Red Eyed Tree Frog by Joy Cowley on a recent trip to Cover to Cover.  The photographs in this book are bright and colorful; very visually appealing.  Joy Cowley starts the story when the frog is waking up and takes you through a day in the life of this frog.  She does a great job of introducing other animals living in the same habitat.  Joy Cowley uses interesting words but keeps the text simple enough for some Kindergartners and first graders to read themselves.

Perfect Square

I found the book perfect square by Michael Hall, while I was shopping at Cover to Cover recently.  The cover popped and I couldn't wait to see what was inside.  This is the story of a square that is "perfectly happy".  Each day the square is altered in some way but instead of being sad about the changes the square decided to make the most of the situation.  The text is simple yet powerful; the illustrations are beautiful. I can see using this story when the kids are learning about shapes, as a mentor for writing and also in an imagination center.