Parent Teacher Conferences

I've got the remaining 10 conferences tonight so I'm going to try and get this in before they begin. (Didn't make it...oops!)

Our morning was filled and productive and wonderful. We started by discussing some posters/motivational items I found. One was called "Own your learning!" which I shared with them that I wanted them to begin doing each time they complete a task. I also read them the quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson and we shared the "10 Ways to be a Great Student!" checklist as well.
                   

Finally, we made a chart describing things we might do that can be considered "Bothering" and things that are "Being a friend." If students are bothering us, these are most likely things that can be handled ourselves which led us to our Reporting vs. Tattling chart. I know, you wouldn't think I'd need to do this in 4th grade but...

We ended our meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance and a few rounds of "Would you rather?" In Math Workshop, we continued our work with the tasks listed on our differentiation dice and I was able to pull a few small groups to teach 3-digit by 1-digit multiplication using partial products and 2-digit by 2-digit multiplication using the area model. Very productive morning! In Pax, we learned a little bit about unintended consequences when Runt followed Bristle and ended up getting caught in an explosion! We practiced our fluency by reading aloud, When Girls Ruled Baseball together. We had some extended independent reading time while kiddos that brought money went to purchase books at the book fair and then worked on finishing our timelines and writing our personal narratives.