Parent Teacher Conferences Part 2

Today we finally begin parent teacher conferences! Woohoo! - As much as I dislike feeling like I am speed-dating and having to meet with 10 sets of parents in a row for fifteen minutes each, I really do think that this is a valuable time to get them on board with helping their child at home. There is only so much differentiation/intervention/one-on-one help we can provide within the classroom so it is extremely important that parents understand a) what their child can do to improve in school and b) how they can help. 

As I mentioned in my last post, I spend the week before conferences testing the little ones to see how many more letters and numbers they recognize, whether they can count syllables, whether they can isolate beginning sounds, identify parts of a book, count to 20, count objects up to 20 etc... All the foundational skills that they will need in order to be successful throughout the rest of the year. 

Now that I have all of that data ready to share with their parents, I am prepared to sit down with each of them and tell them how much their child has already improved since day 1 of Kindergarten and what I would like to see them work harder on. I have found that the best way to do this is to give the parents a little bit of extra homework. So, in case you would like to do the same thing, here is a list of the areas for improvement that I suggest and materials that I will provide for parents to help their child. 

1) Fine Motor Skills: Hand-eye coordination, efficient use of fingers, hands and wrists, etc... Without these skills children have a very hard time writing, cutting, gluing, turning the pages of books and more. Basically everything that they need to be able to do in Kindergarten and beyond relies on these skills being well developed. Here is a handout that you can grab to encourage parents to work on these at home! 

2) Letter Recognition: If students are still struggling with letter naming fluency, I send home a set of uppercase and lowercase letter flashcards and this handout listing different activities that they can do to practice at home. 

3) B&D Confusion: A lot of Kindergarten students have a hard time differentiating between lowercase b & d. There are a lot of great handouts in this packet from Classroom Freebies. I won't use all of them because all of the different strategies together might confuse the student. I'll pick one or two like the "bed" pictures and remind them that "the Bb's are walking and the Dd's are talking". 

4) Numbers: If students are struggling with counting objects, recognizing numerals, or number names, I give them a set of flashcards to work on.

5) Writing: I show parents samples of student writing and use this amazing writing portfolio and rubric with samples from Heidisongs.com.