Conversations and conferring....

As we continue to work to think this through...I am wondering what you have tried with your students in terms of strategy instruction and conferring. What kinds of conversations or teachable moments have you discovered through this way of teaching? Think about a conversation you have had with a child or a small group of children and write about what you discovered that you did not know before. "Show" us that conversation in words here on this blog. Celebrate these moments by remembering each detail of what was said, the expression on the child's face and the interaction between the two of you. This does not have to be an interaction of great proportions or success, just an interaction you can recount, remember and really reflect upon.
Does this interaction demonstrate a "shift" in your thinking and or teaching?

Inferring

In the process of inferring we have to take the time to really slow down our thinking and retrace the path we went through in our minds automatically that allowed us to infer. Identifying this process and the schema involved can be a challenging one. As one person stated in class after our work with the wordless picture books, it is almost like we can infer and then have to think back to what the schema was that led us to this inference.
How does this fit in with your thinking about emerging readers? What about all of the other strategies and processes you engaged in with a wordless picture book where there were no words to decode or pronounce? How much of reading is deeper level thinking versus the surface work of decoding etc.? What does this make you think about in terms of our instruction?