If there's not one huge thing this project has taught me, it's flexibility. I have to say it has been rather frustrating trying to get a weekly meeting in with Kate with both of us being sick off and on for quite a while. These conferences are now off by two weeks because one week I was sick and then the next week she was sick! Technically I should already be done with my final running record, but I just finished my second conference so I will have to come in tomorrow to do both the third conference and the final running record.
This reminds me of the fact that as a teacher there will be many unpredictable moments in my career and I will have to be ready to change my plans at any moment. It is highly likely that students will be absent when I plan to do their reading conferences much like Kate was.
Since Kate is still working on her Magic Tree House book for her leveled book group she just read another excerpt from that for me. Since it has been so long since the last time I met with her she could not even remember what the goals were from the last conference, so I had to refresh her memory. During the entire second conference she was incredibly antsy and couldn't sit still, plus she had a very hard time focusing and staying on task, making it terribly difficult to get across the lesson for the conference. This was unusual behavior for her, but after talking with Lizzie I found that the student she worked with was behaving exactly the same way, doing such things as rolling around on the floor and completely not paying attention to/arguing with her suggestions.
The ALG for this conference was:
A: She did a great job with pausing at the periods this time and adding emphasis on exclamation points and question marks.
L: Although I asked her to practice using her finger to guide her eyes for the next time we met she chose not to do so, so I showed her how to have it move slightly ahead of what she is reading when she transitions lines so she can read more smoothly. She admitted that she normally does use her finger but she said "I love reading without my finger under it." It was here that I stressed the importance of using the finger as a guide for better sentence fluency.
G: Her goal was to practice using the finger to lead her eyes and also to practice breaking down unfamiliar words into recognizable clusters that she can pronounce so we could work on it at the next conference.
Overall I walked away from this conference feeling pretty defeated and frustrated because I didn't feel like we accomplished much. Kate didn't seem to absorb anything because she was so busy playing around, but maybe she'll surprise me tomorrow when I come back for the third conference and remember what we covered.
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