small groups that stick

yes, it’s that time of year (not the marathon/halloween/almost-thanksgiving), but the time when we can finally say, “[insert students’ names here] meet me on the rug for a small group” and know that our students who are still working independently will be relatively sane (and maybe even focused?) without our constant pacing around the room.

we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can make our teaching stick, especially during that sacred small group teaching time. so here’s what we’ve been trying out, from our planning process to the tools we use.

grouping students
we bring our biggest teacher bags to school on fridays so we can pack in all of our kids’ writing folders and bring them home for the weekend to prep our small groups.
some other teachers we know have different methods, like choosing a few folders a night to take home, or spending some time during lunch to plan for groups. we prefer the weekend just because it feels productive to go into the week having a plan for who we’ll be working with each day and what we’ll be teaching them.

we look through our students’ folders with three different lenses, which helps us think about what writers are already doing well, and where they have room to grow. we find it helpful to ask ourselves some key questions as we utilize these lenses. (a special thanks to TCRWP staff developer, LM, for sharing these lenses with us at the saturday reunion this fall!)

process: (what is the writer’s process?)
-is the writer including the name and date? (we have our kids write the date because it’s a powerful tool for us – it allows us to see how many days children are spending on each piece, whether they’re finishing their writing in one day or across days, etc.)
-how many booklets did the writer make this week?
-how many pages are in each booklet?
-does the paper choice match the writer?
-is the writer finishing the books they start?
-is the writer using the tools in the classroom and in their folder?

content/skills: (what does the writer know how to do?)
we’re using the continuums (learning progressions) in the new UoS books to support us. we’re thinking inside chunks of structure, development, craft, and language conventions so that the things children can do are clear to us. the continuums help us identify what kids can do, and what we should teach into next.

follow through/growth: (how did my teaching stick?)
-is there evidence of my teaching across the folder or just in the one piece we worked on together?
-is the writer trying on things i teach independently?
-is the writer using the tool(s) i provided for support?

a cautionary true story: our kids came back from lunch and were screaming, “OUR WRITING FOLDERS DISAPPEARED!!!” of course this is a cause of chaos in kindergarten, but this got us thinking about the importance of sharing what we do with the folders with our writers. we took the opportunity to share with our kids our teaching process; the packing up of the folders, the reading of all their writing each week, the time we take to think carefully about what kids are doing well, and what they’ve just started doing that we will spend some time supporting them with in small groups. we love that kids remind us to take their folders on fridays, and ask us if we read through their folders on mondays. it shows our kids we care about them – and their writing, too, and also, that we’re held accountable by our kids for actually teaching them!

creating a schedule for the week
way, way back when we were both teaching second grade, we made conference/small group schedules that both teachers and students had access to. we are playing around with the idea of creating a similar schedule for our kindergarteners, who can’t help but to constantly be wondering “when will ms. newman/catanzaro be working with me on the rug?!?”

we think there are a few perks to creating a public schedule for your conference/small group plans each week. 1 – it forces you to actually plan out your whole week rather than just planning a few days and saying, “i’ll plan the rest on wednesday…hopefully.” 2 – it lets the kids know when they will get a chance to meet with you and will hopefully put an end to this question: “when am i going to meet with you?” 3 – with some teaching into, students might actually be able to prepare for their time with you. whether this means that students just work a little harder on the days leading up to their time with you or students actually being able to say, “i’m having a hard time with ___.”

ideally, we would have a schedule chart like this for reading, writing, and math. kids can see which teacher they will be working with, the day they will be meeting with them, and the other students that will be in their group.

goal-setting
last year we started meeting with our students to set overarching goals for their work as writers. typically, these goals would fall under the “content/skills” or “process” sections above. the questions we ask ourselves when thinking about what students’ goals should be are: what are students doing really well? what is their very next step for learning? for example, if a student is consistently writing lots of labels with a beginning, middle, and ending sounds their goal would be to write sentences. in the beginning, students are usually only working on one big goal that could transfer to any genre of writing. we thought that having any more than 1-2 goals would be overwhelming for our 5-year-olds.

after spending a lot of time with our learners and looking at their writing work, we decided what their first goal should be (yes, the first goal-setting meeting is very teacher-directed). we met with groups of students who all had the same needs, therefore got the same goal. eventually, we want our students to be able to honestly and accurately say what they think they need to work on (adding more labels, writing sentences, drawing with shapes and lines, putting spaces between words, etc.) but this requires lots of scaffolding, especially in kindergarten!

after meeting with students to introduce them to their new goal, show them what it looks like, and give them an opportunity to try it out, we left them with this goal card taped onto the front of their writing folder. this serves as a reminder for what they should be working on each day during writing workshop and also a way for them to keep track of how many times they are doing what the goal says. as you can see, this student is keeping track of her goal by making a little dot each time she writes a sentence.

a few things to keep in mind when setting goals: the goal should be just-right for the student – not too hard and not something they are already doing. also, the goal should be changing every so often (we think 4-6 weeks is a good amount of time). if it takes much longer than that, the goal might be too difficult for that student to do independently.

tools
we also leave our students with tools to support them in reaching their goal, or whatever the teaching point was in the small group that we pulled (which is usually related to the goal). remember – too many tools can get confusing and overwhelming for kids, so try to stick to one or two tools that will really support students with the majority of the work they are doing.

the mini-charts that you leave students with should reflect the large charts you have hanging up around the room. you could even just take a picture of the large chart and print it out for a student to keep in his/her writing folder. this mini-chart was made on 8 ½ x 11 paper and copied for each student in the group.

alyssa thought of this brilliant idea for keep an updated word wall and ABC chart at each table. just laminate the charts and tape them onto a block like this and voila! deanna prints out these charts and puts them in the sheet protector in the middle of each student’s folder as needed.

we study one or two mentor texts as a whole class that will support the work students will be doing in each writing unit. usually, we try to put a copy of that mentor text at each table so that students can easily reference it when they need to. sometimes we bring in different mentor texts for a small group, so we might photocopy a few pages of that text to leave with the students.

we know you have great ideas for making your small group teaching stick and would love to hear them! you can email us at primaryperks@gmail.com or comment below. we also love getting tweets! @primaryperks @alyssalnewman @dee4soul

thanks for reading!
a & d