Monday, March 19, 2018

Kindergarten Student-Led Conferences

In the fall, Kindergarten did a traditional parent teacher conference. However, this time around we organized student-led conferences! With this setup, the students are in charge of everything! We spent the last two week preparing for conferences by practicing games, setting goals, and finding books at our reading levels. We even practiced by showing our 6th grade buddies a preview of the conference! Student-led conferences can be organized in many different ways depending on age and what you want students to share with parents, but for our students we chose to set up stations to demonstrate something from each academic subject.

Instead of the traditional 15 minute conference, these conferences were 45 minutes long. This allowed students to lead their parents through six stations: 2 math stations, 1 writing station, 1 phonics station, 1 reading station, and 1 goals station.

For math, students demonstrated two math games that we play in class. The games are Hundreds Chart Battleship, and Number Bond Stories. Both are engaging activities, and it was fun to see the students teach the rules to their parents!

For writing, students showed their parents two writing pieces, one from the first week of school, and one that we just wrote. With our 6th grade buddies, we each wrote a Glow and Grow comment on both of the pieces of writing. A Glow comment is something that we did really well at, and a Grow comment is something that we want to work on to get better at next time. It was so fun for the students to see their writing from the beginning of the year up until now... they couldn't believe it! This was also my favorite part for parents to see. It even caused a few to tear up over how much progress their child has made over the year!

At the phonics station, students practiced their sight words by having their parent read them a word, and then the student wrote that word out in sand.


For our reading station, students picked out five books at their reading level and practiced them for weeks leading up to the conference so they could read them to their parents!


Finally, the last station was the goals table. As a class, we brainstormed some ideas to come up with academic and social goals for students to practice through the rest of the year. It was great for parents to see what goals are important to their child so they can support them in reaching these goals as well!

Overall, the student-led conferences were a great success. The students were proud of their work, and parents got an authentic look at what their Kindergartner does at school everyday.

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