Parent Teacher Conferences

Parent Teacher Conferences today - and I've been up since roughly 2:30 this morning. That makes for a lovely combination, doesn't it? More like a toxic one! 

So what's a gal to do when she can't sleep? How about a little personal Professional Development? 

This first one, I have no idea what I was looking at that gave me this idea. I think it was turning over of my mind from yesterday's Grade Level PLC where we talked about how to step up the rigor. My students have Reading Journals. I've tried, at the end of the week, to have them do some writing about our story from our anthology, or to complete a graphic organizer. Last night, I got to thinking, why don't I have them write every day - or at least more often? I was thinking that on Mondays, I could have them write a prediction on our story. Maybe on Wednesday, I could have them write a short bit about their favorite part, or something that would tie into our comprehension strategy for the week. I don't know for sure, it's a work in progress, but I like this idea. 

Second, I ended up at Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits and she had a nice post about teaching phonics, which led me to different places on her blog, and in the midst of that, I saw some little books she had made. Each one of the little books focuses on one set of phonics skills - like Y says i {we just did this recently}. And I was thinking that this might be something that I could make into class books. My thought was I could do the first page, and student could do their own page. I might even make this a bit competitive - I have some little 8x8 photo albums. I don't know how many pages are in each one, but I could say that the best - say, 10 get in the book! I'd love to have my kids practice reading sentences that have phonics that we just learned. {OK, that's a terrible sentence!}

Now I've got to run so I won't be late for conferences! Happy Thursday. Hoping I can stay awake and alert all dang day!