Plan a Portfolio Party

It's Spring! And the children are blooming! Thanks, Lasenia Jones, principal extraordinaire, for those words of wisdom! It's true! Whatever struggles you may have have had all year in identifying the needs of each of your students, working diligently to fill every gap in their learning, while juggling standards and testing along with behavior management, when Spring comes, you start to notice some of the results of your efforts beginning to bloom. It's a great feeling.

The growth that always meant the most to me was the growth that my students showed as writers right around this time of year. In April, May, and June, I no longer felt like I was dragging just another word, sentence, or thought out of my kids. I actually began to feel like an effective teacher of writing, a coach allowing their creativity and personal take on things to soar. As I went through portfolio collections, the growth could easily be seen. Poems flowed, paragraphs made sense, and ideas just were not so hard to come by. It was easier to assess the writing because it was fun to read! In fourth and fifth grade, little touches of humor began to peek through. Loved grading those papers with a smile on my face!

With all this growth in mind, Spring is the perfect time to celebrate your students as writers and as producers of great work in general by having a Portfolio Party. It can be as simple or as fancy as you'd like. Your kids will appreciate any type of celebration, any positive recognition of their work. For me, some years it was simply meeting with our buddy class and sharing some of our favorite pieces with them as they shared theirs with us. Some years, it was all-out party mode with invitations, refreshments, and all the glitter I thought adults might be able to handle!

This type of celebration is definitely different from a student-led conference. There should be no discussion of assessments and goal setting, no stars and wishes, just stars, stars, and more stars! Accomplished authors sharing the fruits of their labors with pride. Chairs in a circle for individual presentations, or smaller groupings around your room. Plan it with your young authors.

If your portfolios are a little short of writing pieces this year for any of the reasons that our challenging profession has presented, April is the perfect month to get that collection growing. April is poetry month! Poetry is short and doesn't have a lot hard and fast rules to follow. It flows from the heart.

Journal pieces or interactive notebook reflections (maybe one from each month) also make great additions to portfolios. My students loved collecting their pieces and gluing them into bare books. I have posts all about that here and here. We also loved selecting a special story or essay and making it into a picture book, actually published by Studentreasures.

Whether the collection is a glossy hardcover book with the author's name on the spine (What could be better, right?) or a file folder or a construction paper mounted and lovingly hand assembled handful of writing pieces, the pride that your students will feel will last for years.

Here are some resources that just might help you to build those collections:

For more Spring ideas to try, check out these great Teacher Talk blog posts:

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