Thinking About Conferences

Here's part of my "haul" from the Valentine's Day party at school:

Thank you and oh my goodness. This was my before school haul. Then I got a whole bunch more during the party. Yup, some of this is headed to hub-bub's work for those moochers to take care of. 

Did you survive your party? I told my kids not to mention the V word until 3:00! Or there would be sad times for sure!!

OK, serious school stuff now - 
here's my problem:

I have this cute little field trip form from the semester I taught 3rd grade - 6 years ago! But for some reason I made mega copies. {This pictures does not adequately show the stack!} I also was quite clever and made a pre-field trip form. Oh, yes, I was on a roll! 

The problem - we aren't even going on any field trips this year. And this has been in my file cabinet for 6 years! But we are limited on copies now. And I might want it ... someday! But my files cabinets are starting to bulge and I need the room. Argh! I think I need someone to come stand beside me and say "it's ok to toss that!" 

{Now wasn't that some serious school stuff!!}

Our parent teacher conferences are in a couple weeks, so I've been trying to think ahead to those. Alyce at Mrs. Bartel's School Family had a good link to another blogger's packet for conferences. Of course, not one to take the easy way, I'm going to modify it for my class.

Something else I'm doing is taking data from my class and putting it into graphs. Boy, if that doesn't scare some parents. OK, really, I'm not doing it to be mean:

But if you are all happy that your kiddo is the highest in the class, maybe thinking about why they haven't moved up in 6 months of school would be a good idea. {This is for DRA scores - blue is coming into 2nd grade (1st grade scores); red is September; green is December}. 

Anyway, I've never done this before, but I'm going to try it {in a very gracious way!}. I don't really want to compare students, but I think it's good for parents to know - your child is the lowest in the class; or not making progress and others are. I'm a little nervous.

So what do you really want to tell your parents at conferences? And how are you going to do it? Inquiring minds want to know!