Conferences & Donors Choose

It was wonderful to see so many of you during conferences and to see all the kiddos showing off their skills! I had never done student-led conferences prior to this year and I thought they were great! It seemed like many families stayed for longer than a half hour, which was wonderful, but I think that next time I would schedule time slots for longer than 30 minutes just so families don't feel rushed. If you have any additional feedback about what you liked or didn't like about this kind of conference, please leave me a comment or let me know. I am always interested to know how parents perceive things and want to make sure that you are getting what you need out of the experience.

I got some feedback from several parents during the conferences that the time with literacy bags is too short, so I am going to extend the length of time each bag can stay at home. I will send a note about this when we return, but I am thinking of extending the return day to Wednesday as I realized it really makes more sense for the bags to be in the hands of students than hanging in my closet during the week.

Right before break, Nikole Emerson and I looked through some of the cool science materials that Lakeshore has to offer and I put together a proposal to get some fun activities through DonorsChoose.org. The project posted yesterday and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that there have already been $125 in donations from some of my friends and family :0). They very cleverly have created a way to link proposals to facebook to help teachers spread the word. The idea behind DonorsChoose is that public school teachers can request materials needed for a specific project, activity, classroom enrichment, etc. Once donations have been made in the entire amount of my proposal, they will ship the materials. Here are the items that Nikole and I chose to request:

Since we do not have enough time in our short half-day program for science instruction, I want to have these great materials available to students to use for discovery and exploration during choice time. I used DonorsChoose to obtain many of the books that are included in the literacy bags and have had a few other successfully funded projects when I taught first grade. I am hoping this project is funded as well so that my classes this year can benefit from these materials.

See you next week!