In this conference, I meet with Cameron, a confident writer who is working on her narrative rough draft. It is a good example of a student who just needed a little extra guidance to get back on the right track. She was beginning to edit when she should still be revising her piece.
I think this is a good example of how to start a conference. It is always a good idea to ask the student what he/she is working on at the moment. This gives the teacher a good idea of where to take the conference, and shows that you trust kids to make the decisions about what they are working on.
This conference made me once again think that maybe my mini-lesson was not clear. Cameron seems more focused on correcting mistakes rather than on trying out a new writing strategy. However, she is at the perfect stage of the writing process for this mini-lesson. She has completed most of her rough draft, and she can now go back and try to rewrite some of it with a new strategy. It just took a quick check-in to get her back on track.
| STUDENT: | I told you that I already finished my story so it's okay if we started this before? |
| TEACHER: | Sure. |
| STUDENT: | So is it okay? |
| TEACHER: | Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you have a great story idea here. So what are you working on as you're - you had already written sort of a rough draft, right? |
| STUDENT: | I have it here. |
| TEACHER: | And it's amazing. You read that one piece to me and you have this way of like grabbing the reader. I know I just wanted to keep hearing more and more about it. So what are you going to try to work on now in your writing? What are you trying to do to make it better? |
| STUDENT: | Well, probably a bunch of stuff like spelling. Sometimes I write and I like leave out words so I read through them and the spelling too and paragraphing. |
| TEACHER: | Okay. And how about techniques? Is there anything that you remember that one of the authors did that you liked, that you want to try in your book? |
| STUDENT: | Um, beautiful language and similes. |
| TEACHER: | You're going to try to add some similes. You had some similes. |
| STUDENT: | Yeah. |
| TEACHER: | Didn't you? I remember a few of them. |
| STUDENT: | Yeah, I.. no.. that's not a simile. |
| TEACHER: | I can see that that's very descriptive, very beautiful. Kind of like what Libba Moore Gray did with lots of words to describe something. Right? |
| STUDENT: | Alexa slapped her alarm clock like it was an old mother's baby. |
| TEACHER: | [laughs] Excellent. All right. So you're going to try to add some similes and you're going to try to add some beautiful language and then you're working on some of your conventions. Excellent. | STUDENT: | I have eighteen pages. I'm not going to finish it by today, for sure. | TEACHER: | That's okay I know you have a great story going here so now I think the key is to try to pick out different techniques each day to try to add to your writing to make it even better? | STUDENT: | Okay. | TEACHER: | But you definitely got something good here and now you can go back and improve on it. | STUDENT: | Okay. | TEACHER: | Nice job. |