Conferring & Sharing (chapters 14,15, & 17)

First of all, I want to say.......HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!!!! :)

So as I was reading, I was simultaneously trying to think of what I would say when conferring with my future students. I was thinking to myself, "How could someone like me who is not a very strong writer, tell students tips of how to make their writing better?" I began reading on and saw that on page 161, Ray says that "With any opening inquiry, our goal at the beginning of a conference is to get the student talking" (Ray, p. 161). This gave me some peace of mind because it showed that the teacher does not have to do all of the talking in the conference. Some things that you (Ms. Friese) helped us with in just a whole group setting due to time restraints, was to give us knowledge about the bullet points actually listed on page 164. You have shown us how living our lives as writers can be us just simply writing in our notebooks and saving these pieces to show our students one day. I remember you specifically telling me that it's okay if I don't currently have any pieces to share with my future students because with our writer's notebook for this class we will be planning and developing different types of pieces. The bullet points on page 164 also go on to list getting and giving responses to writing which you have already done since you have completed our first notebook check.

It has been both neat and helpful that you have been modeling a writing workshop conference for us so that we can see firsthand how it is done. Of course you had to technically do your "conferring" via Post-It notes in our notebooks because of the limited amount of time we have each week. Ideally you would have had inidvidual conferences with each of us, but I like how you improvised and still gave us feedback in regards to our writing. You taking the time to read my notebook made me want to produce better quality writing. This goes along with what I read on page 174 that states, "For many of our writers, talk is essential because when they are writing every single day, they just need to get some regular feedback to keep their momentum going" (Ray, p. 174). I felt like this section of the textbook was totally talking about me personally! Haha. :) I also could relate to the section titled "Simple Response Share" because it reminded me of when I shared my narrative draft with my classmates sitting at my table a couple weeks ago. I was willing to share by reading my narrative draft out of my notebook to this small group of girls, but I would not have wanted to raise my hand and read it in front of our whole class.