Conferencing Freebies

I don't know about you...but I love conferencing with kids! I love having conversations about books, math problems, and their newest writing pieces. I gain so much insight into the child, just by sitting and listening!

Conferencing is a powerful assessment tool, but, at times, it can be very hard to manage.Writing the same teaching point 6 times in a row or wondering who didn't I conference with yet this week--can turn this tool into a major hassle.

Throughout the years, my conferencing style, plans, and organization have changed as I grew into my conferring craft. Here I'm going to share with you some conferencing forms and tricks that have worked for me and my students!

Here are some individual conferencing sheets:

This one is generic for literacy and I used it a lot when I first started conferencing. There's a built in cheat sheet just in case I forgot the format of a conference (this conference sheet is very Teachers' College!)

I used these sheets last year with my fifth graders! In the Guided Reading one, GR stands for Guided Reading, SL is Strategy Lesson, and RR is running record. On these sheets, I gave my students goals and strategies to work on as they read, wrote, or practiced their math. 

        **Since my students are older, I have them write in the next steps (which is where they wrote the teaching point, which had a strategy attached to it). It saved me lots of time and it taught them to take ownership of their learning!
        **If you have your groups preplanned, you can also type the next step onto labels and simply stick them onto the sheet at the end of the conference. 

Planning for Groups

This helped me keep track of my groups in reading. 

GG-is goal group; SL-is strategy lesson; GR-is guided reading

My reading block is long enough to allow me to meet with 2 groups. After I teach the lesson, the kiddos try-out the teaching point while I have my first group conference. I usually coach students on the day's teaching point during this conference or conduct running records. After ten minutes, the students go into their stations and I have another group. This group is longer and it's either in a guided reading book or a classroom read aloud book (strategy lesson).

Another group planner for reading, writing, and math with a link to the standards.

How do I keep track of all these conferences?

I use this...

I write the student names down the side and the week of date at the bottom. When I meet with a student, I put a check next to their name. At a glance, I can see who still needs a conference by the end of the week in reading, writing, and math!

I created this at the end of the year because I noticed that some of my higher kids only had a few conferences. This form really helped me to see where all my conferences were going (that in itself was very interesting to see!!)

I put all the conferencing forms from this post together in a freebie for you!! Click HERE for the forms!!

How do you keep track of your conferences? I'd love to hear about it :)