Conferences and the Daily 5

Meeting with every family is very important to me.  I am so thankful for the meetings we shared last week.  Thank you for taking time out of your busy lives to meet with me so that we could talk about your child and the progress he or she is making.  I'm confident that the conversations we had will help to facilitate greater student achievement.

In the course of each conference, the conversation, for a time, focused on your child's progress toward the reading standards.  We likely discussed your child as a reader, reviewed his or her current goal in reading and talked about the strategies that he or she is practicing toward meeting that goal.  Each family went home with a "Parent Pipeline."  I hope this description of the strategy that your child is practicing will be helpful at home. I will send your student home with new Pipelines each time his or her reading goal and/or strategies to practice toward that goal change.

While conferencing, I attempted to explain the Daily 5 and CAFE which are the structures I use to deliver ELA instruction.  It is difficult to visualize what our ELA class might look like in contrast to the experiences we had during our own schooling.  In addition, having few precious moments together limited the time we could spend talking about these structures.  I have attached a digital newsletter to the right.  It describes the Daily 5 in great detail.  Embedded in this newsletter is a video that I produced last year for a faculty meeting.  I think the video does a nice job of showing what the Daily 5 looks like in the classroom.  I love using the Daily 5 because it enables my students to engage in the literacy behaviors that research proves, accelerate student achievement in reading.  Equally important to me is time it affords me to meet with individual students and small groups to deliver instruction that is specifically designed to meet the needs of these students.  I hope you enjoy the newsletter and video.  
    I hope that you have a lovely Thanksgiving with your families.  I am thankful for all of the blessings in my life, especially having the opportunity to do what I love...teach your children.

Sincerely,
Marie