The ABC's and My 1s, 2s and 3s: March 2017

Twice a year we formally invite the families of our students into our school. It is an exciting time for the students and their families, one that I look forward to! It is VERY different then the parent teacher conferences that I remember from my childhood. These interactions were filled will high anxiety and stress on the part of myself and my parents. I had one particularly terrible experience when I was in grade 2 and honestly the memory of this experience still haunts me today. However, it is also the reason I vowed to NEVER have a parent or child leaving conferences feeling the way that I did or how my parents had.

This is why in Room 6 we conduct student led conferences, these experiences are full of positive sharing, guiding their parents through their learning and end with a positive strength based conversation with families.

For the first conferences in November we decided as a class to take our families through a basic week in room 6 with a focus on our math workshop. Students played a math game with their parents (one they had to teach them how to play), created a piece of math art, looked through their independent work duotang and played a math computer game. Families were also challenged by taking home a problem solving activity, to shared and worked on at home. There was so much positive feedback that for the second round of conferences I wanted to follow a similar structure of the students guiding their parents through their learning. However, this term the focus shifted to literacy and connecting families from our classroom together in a meaningful way.

One of our literacy favourites in the classroom is our daily quick writes, this is a time each day when students write about various topics for only 5 minutes! The hope and goal of this writing is to trigger the really deep ideas that may eventually become a full writing piece. So naturally the students wanted their parents to complete a quick write! The two options were:

-Write about the day your son/daughter was born...

-Make a list of the things you enjoy doing with your son/daughter, just the two of you!

I was so incredibly moved by the honesty, and pure/raw emotion that many families put into this activity that I had to share a few (the names have been removed).

These just warmed my heart and being pregnant had me shed a few tears...Thank you families for sharing❤❤❤

Another part of our student led conferences that I wanted to share was our Manitoba Map activity. We have been learning about our province, looking at major cities, towns and places within our province. So we created a large map and had our families come and write their names besides all of the places that they have lived, visited or travelled to within Manitoba. It was great to see families excited to share and talk about their experiences. This is what our final map looked like:

What do you do during parent teacher or student led conferences??

Until next time...

Nicole and Room 6

There are many different field trip locations that we can take our kids in Winnipeg...the zoo, to a local farm, the forks etc. and all of these places are great! The kids look forward to going and always have a great time! Our second field trip this year was to a favourite place amongst many kids, The Children's Museum, it has so many key elements that make a field trip great: open space, a water element, physical play and so on and so on..

Field trips are a great way for the students to get out of the school and experience different stimuli then they are used to, as well giving them the opportunity to work and play with students from another classroom. This year we have been teaming up with a grade 1 class from our school on several field trips and its has been great to see the students all getting along with each other and having a great day!

Here are some highlights from the day: