Parent teacher conferences

I may be one of the few who like parent teacher conferences, but I like to be able to talk to the parents face to face and discuss their child's progress in school.  I use a form to help guide my conference, and I found this most useful when talking to parents about their child.  The organization of the form is great for both parents and teachers to use.  It has both positives of what their child can do already, and  goals, of what their child is working on or towards.

I schedule my parent teacher conferences before and after school during the last two weeks of the first quarter.  We are required to conference with all parents for quarter one.  I set up my conferences using signup genius.com and create 20 minute slots for parents to sigh up for.  The signup tool is great for if parents need to change their time, they can do it right on the site and an email will be sent to both the teacher and the parent to remind them of their time scheduled.

Along with my conference guide, I also like to show parents some of their child's work in the classroom.  I will usually keep a writing that their child has done in class to show parents at conferences.  I like to point out the good things their child is already doing in writing and point out some things that they will be working on this year to improve their writing. I also like to include a rubric of what the expectations of first grade writing should include.  This way the parents have something to understand why they are getting a certain grade in writing and can help their child expand on their writing.

In the folder I also include a story re-telling rope for the parents to go over with their child when Reading a story and discussing it after.  I include some of the reading strategies that I teach my students so they can hear the same language at home to help them with decoding unfamiliar words. 

The last big thing that I encourage parents to use is our team blackboard site.  Our school requires us to keep a blackboard site and we also have a first grade mega site with a lot of different games and sites that our students use during computer lab time. I encourage the parents to allow their child to get on here and use the different resources available to the students for extra support in reading, and math. With this, I show the parents our blackboard site and then give the parents a copy of their child's login information so they can access it from home.