Digital Reading Conference Form

I have been doing reading conferences during Daily 5 time in my classroom for a solid 2 1/2 school years. I am a firm believer that the Daily 5 program isn't being used effectively until you are meeting with students and conducting reading conferences.

Each year, I have set up a large binder like "The Sisters" did with a tab for each student. It was about 2 inches thick and full of papers, dividers, and other items. I lugged it with me from conference to conference, hand-writing notes from the conferences quickly so that I wouldn't miss anything.

Well, the problem with writing quickly is that my hand writing is awful. It looks like chicken scratch. I don't have "cute teacher handwriting." :-( So, I was always annoyed that my binder looked messy.

I saw on a few teacher blogs that people were creating Google Forms to manage their reading conferences. I had never been on Google Docs before, but I decided to check it out.

I used one of the other teacher's forms as a guide as well as my own memory of what my conference forms look like, and I created a very cute, very functional form that I can use during reading conferences either on a computer or my iPad.

One point that the other teachers made about using this type of form versus carrying around the huge binder is that the binder can sometimes be intimidating to students. The more I thought about it, the more intimidated I would be if my teacher brought a 2 inch binder to a conference and wrote things down while I was reading and responding. These streamlined forms on the Internet provide a less intimidating experience for the kids...in my opinion, of course.

The best part about this form is that there is a summary option where you can see helpful, colorful graphs of all of your reading conference form data. You can easily see your students' strength areas and improvement areas in graph form, which I think would be awesome for showing parents at conference time or bringing to a meeting about a student's progress. Schools are now relying on black and white data as much as possible, and this is just another way to meet that need.

Here is the link to the form I made...you will first be taken to the "spreadsheet" view (not so cute). Go to Form and then click on Go to Live Form and you will see what it looks like all said and done.
Reading Conference Form

If you would like to get started, just go here and click on Create and then select Form. You can play around with cute themes and types of questions from there. It's really very easy! Then you can save it to your Google Docs page and access it either by emailing it to yourself or if you can access www.google.com from school, you're set!

I love technology!

Mission: "Binderize"

Binderize. Is that a word? I have been looking into "binderizing" my classroom for quite some time now. I just hate the way I never use my filing cabinets and have tons of files that I find WAY after the fact and wish I would have used during the year. Right now, I'm going through some baskets of "to file" papers and seeing a lot of good stuff I should have pulled out this year. (Insert signature forehead palm slap HERE) I have GOT to figure out a better system for housing all of these valuable files, and a big, ugly, tan, rusted filing cabinet isn't it.

Introducing Mission: Binderize. I have found a few blogs where the teachers "binderized" their rooms and were monstrously happy afterwards. That is what I'm working toward...being monstrously happy at work. :-) So...I need to develop a system that works for me. A lot of the classroom blogs that have done this are primary. Primary classrooms use a lot of themes and seasonal ideas, whereas a lot of times I am going, "Holy crap...Christmas is next week!" and then I just pull of random Christmas Internet pages. Ugh...blah. My point is that we don't use themes and season to drive our planning (unfortunately...because I think that would be so much more awesome)...so I knew that making a binder for each month wasn't going to cut it.

For now I have started just going through files and pitching the old stuff and things I have 100 copies of and dividing the papers into subject areas. My plan is to then go through and divide them by topics/standards. AHHH...my head hurts thinking about it. However, I think if I can get them into some useful binders and have things within easier access, I will be able to see what I have and then actually use what I have...which is probably a good thing.

Wish me luck.

Hardware Store White Boards

For a couple of years now, I have been seeing teachers on the Internet make dry erase boards out of "shower board" from the hardware store. I have always been kind of intimidated by the hardware store, but I decided this morning when we went to buy paint for our sun room that it was time to just ask about it.

So, I made my husband do it. :-)

Thankfully, they knew what we needed! We were at Lowes, and it was near the wood paneling and trim section, not in the plumbing section like you would think. It's called a lot of things...shower board, tile board, smooth bead board, etc...but if you describe what you need to the handy people who work there, they should be able to help you out.

This was a 4 feet by 8 feet sheet for a little less than $12. Bargain! Doing my quick math skills, I knew that amounted to about 32 1'x1' dry erase boards for $12! We sweet talked the lumber cutter guy into cutting them for us, no extra charge, and we ended up with a really great deal.

I slid over to the tape aisle and picked out three rolls of colored duct tape to put around the edges. It's probably not necessary, but it will keep the edges from splitting or fraying, and it will be a little cuter, too!

So, the grand total was around $23 with tax, which included 32 white boards and 3 rolls of fancy duct tape (which was $3.50 each).

I will post photos when I get them all taped and ready!

P.S. I have read that you should buy a wax furniture protector spray to spray the tops of the boards to make sure the marker slides off and doesn't stick. I will be looking into that, too.

Have fun, and don't be afraid of the hardware store!