Organize Your Reading Data and Confer with Consistency

I love new beginnings! It's one of the best parts about our jobs as teachers.

I love new decorations, new binders, shiny new pens and posters, etc., etc. Every brand new year starts out with lots of energy, enthusiasm and consistency.

In the beginning of a new year, I do all the things good teachers are supposed to do. And I especially make sure to confer with my readers, writers and mathematicians daily. I love getting to know my new students strengths and weaknesses and I'm consistent with taking records and keeping my conferrring notes organized.

And then comes Christmas, and sing-a-longs, and read-ins, and parties, and a few days go by where I can't squeak in conferring, or I forget to take notes on the great conversations I had with readers or writers, and my conferring binder gets buried under papers that need to be graded. Welcome back reality!!! And well, you know where I'm going with all of this. Hopefully I'm not alone.

So this year - I'm making a goal to be MORE consistent with conferring during reading, writing and math workshops. To assist my goal, I've spent the last few weeks designing my ideal conferrring binder and it's finally complete, printed and ready to go.

Just look at all the goodies it contains!!! Fifty pages of organized goodness. I've also included 5 pages of instructions on how to set up the binder and how I use conferring binders in my classroom. I have absolutely no excuse this year to slack on my conferring duties!!!!