I began the meeting with The Morning Message.

I asked students: "What do you know about the print in my message?" Here is a picture of the phonemic elements they selected:

 As you can see, they identified m's, r's, i's  and s's before I took the lesson in a particular direction. No doubt the kids could have told me much more about the print before them, but

 I chose to focus the discussion on the two sounds of s. In addition, we took a good look at the sight word is. It's important that the morning message exercise not go on too long. I accept responses until someone mentions a phoneme or convention that I want to highlight.  We spend a few moments  pooling our knowledge, and then we move on.

Next I read Kitten's First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes. (I pointed out the s's in the title and in the author's name of course.) I recommend reading a picture book every day, cover to cover, without stopping. I want students to listen to the language, the pacing, and the story in the way the author intended it to be read. (Nothing supports sentence fluency more than reading aloud to students.) The picture book I choose, however, is carefully selected. Often it will serve as a mentor text later in the week. Then, because the students have listened to the text in its entirety, I can go directly to the section that models writing craft during the mini-lesson.

Moving onto the mini-lesson today, I pointed out that Kevin Henke's book was about a "poor kitten" - my story would be about a "poor puppy." I told a story, drawing the picture as I went.   After I completed the story, I wrote the text to accompany it.   (I want kindergarten students to prewrite by drawing and am usually able to extend their writing by focusing on details in their sketches. Mrs. Kluesener's class did fabulously detailed drawings today.)

I then asked, "What will you work on today?" Students reported and we all moved on to Quiet Ten. (The Quiet Ten music was George Winston's Too Much Between Us). I wrote for five minutes to allow for a brief author's chair at the end of the session.  

During the conferencing, I was able to reinforce students' quality details, extend their writing (several students turned the pages of their journal to write page two of their stories) and reinforce the sight word is. The entire session from morning message to author's chair took 45 minutes and the students were in "author mode" the entire time.  Kudos to Ms. Kluesener, her students, and the teachers at Stephens Elementary for sharing this classroom and for the amazing work they're doing.