Differentiation difficulties

Yesterday was the first day back from spring break. I really didn't want to go back to school. Not because I don't love my kids and my job but I just enjoyed my time off. But I couldn't complain too much. I only went to school a half day yesterday and then I was out today. I had doctor appointments. You'd think I could have made them the week of spring break. But the one I had today I made the appointment in February and today was the first day that they could get me in. My appointment yesterday was about my knee and I was a little disappointed in the results. I had surgery on my ACL in November. I actually tore the ACL and meniscus when I was a freshman in high school and didn't do anything about it then. So there's a lot of damage. I was hoping that this ACL surgery would fix my issues but it doesn't seem like it has. I'm still having some pain in one side of my knee. I have done really well with physical therapy and have full motion and flexibility with my knee. I've been trying to get back into exercising by walking and swimming. I love walking when the weather is nice. Well the doctor told me that I need to start wearing a brace whenever I'm going to be on my feet for a while and definitely when walking or hiking. He also said that I need to focus more on swimming, biking, and the elliptical instead of walking for exercising. I know it's not the end of the world and  it isn't that big of a deal. But I feel really discouraged. I'm worried that I'm going have to have more surgery and I have better things to do than that. I also have to continue with my physical therapy. I don't mind it because I love where I go to physical therapy at and I love the people there. But I think I'm the only one that has been there this long except the older people. So enough about my complaining. I have tried to keep an upbeat attitude about it all so I need to continue with that.
So onto something a little more educational and school related. Differentiation. I try to differentiate and I try to meet all my kids needs but it's hard. One of my weaknesses as a teacher and really is a person, is I get great ideas but it takes me a while to follow through on them. I started the school year out really wanting to differentiate my spelling program and now that there are 8 weeks left of school, I'm finally following through on this. The week before spring break, most of my kids did very poorly on their spelling test. I had 4 students who got 104. So this week, we're working on those words again and then my 4 that got a 100 are doing a different list. My problem is that it is hard to find words for these students that need more of a challenge. But it went well yesterday for those students to work on a different list of words. So hopefully, I can follow through with this these last few weeks.
One area that I do a good job with differentiation is homework. I send home 4 different levels of reading fluency homework and some weeks it's 5 different levels. I started out the year just doing one. But I have 2 students who are far and above ahead of everyone else in reading. So it has kind of just evolved and it works. This week my high average group are working on a readers' theater script. I'm excited to see how they do with it. These students are very dramatic and enjoy working with each other.
So my ongoing professional goal is to differentiate my instruction more. I also need to work on using my assistant better. So I watched a few videos on PD360 (that's this online professional development that our district subscribes too.) about differentiation and I got a couple of ideas. One of the major themes was giving students choice in how they completed an assignment and in what kind of group they worked in.
So I tried it out yesterday with our frog life cycle assignment. I made a few copies of the life cycle page from Kaci's All About Frogs unit and then gave the choice of doing this worksheet or making their own flip book. I was surprised how many of them wanted to create their own life cycle.

Overall I was satisfied with how this assignment turned out. I am definitely going to try to be more creative in how students present information. My next task to really tackle with differentiation is math. I would love to hear how you meet different students' needs and what ways you differentiate in your class.
It's back to school tomorrow and I'm looking forward to continuing our Oviparous animals unit. Tomorrow it's all about sea creatures.

Oviparous Animal Activities Part 1

I'm finally back to blogging about something that has some substance or school related. Although I did have fun joining in the linky parties. It's been nice to have time to play on my computer and do some blogging and creating. Last week we worked on Oviparous Animals. (check out my peek at my week linky with my plans.) We had a snow day thrown in the week and a half day on Friday so I didn't quite get to everything I wanted to do. So we'll be continuing with Oviparous animals next week. I played around with Picasa yesterday and learned how to edit some of my pictures and to make collages of pictures. I'm excited about how easy it is to use.
On Monday I introduced what an oviparous animals was. When the kids came in the room, I had a chart up. It was egg shaped and just had the word oviparous on it. The students completed an anticipation guide (You can find that freebie on my peek at my week.) Then we read a book.

After reading Chickens Aren't the Only Ones (World of Nature Series)  we made a list of all the oviparous animals we had read about. I starred some of the ones we'd be talking about this week. Then later in the day we read this book An Egg Is Quiet.

I loved this book. It had the most beautiful illustrations and lots of information about eggs. After we read this book, the kids wrote their own sentence An egg is and then drew an egg with crayon. After they had drawn with crayon, they water colored the egg. They turned out so well. 

Tuesday was our snow day but the plan was to learn about chickens. So this was moved to Wednesday. I'm annoyed with myself because I didn't take a picture of our life cycles that we worked on. They were from Kaci Hoffer's Chicken Life Cycle Pack.

 We read a couple of books about chickens. 

From Egg to Chicken (How Living Things Grow)
Dora's Eggs

Then we made a class life cycle and the kids were able to make their own life cycle. Kaci has a different ones to choose from. 

On Thursday it was all about Sea Turtles. This was one of my favorite animals to talk about. I was lucky enough to see them in Hawaii and I've been hooked on them since. 

One Tiny Turtle: Read and Wonder

We read this book. It was a great story and had lots of facts in it. After I read the book, I passed out a nonfiction passage about sea turtles I had gotten from Stephanie at Fallin in First (the link for this can be found in my visual plans.) The kids partner read the passage after we talked about the vocabulary words. Then they picked 3 facts and wrote sentences on the back. Then they made their sea turtle and wrote one fact on the back. They turned out really cute. Stephanie includes templates for the craftivity but I don't really use templates. I have the students use shapes to make their projects. 

So that's what we did the week before spring break for oviparous animals. When we get back next week, we're going to finish up the unit. We'll be talking about frogs, insects, and sea animals. I've really enjoyed this unit and I think the kids have too. I hope to be back with some visual plans this weekend. I'm hoping to do a little more than just my reading plans. 

Yesterday I worked on Spring has Sprung Math Workstations Activities. You can check it out on TPT here.

I can't wait to get this printed out and ready to go for my kids to use the next few weeks. I've gotten behind in my math workstations.

I also updated my Spring is in the Air: write the room activities. If you purchased it already, you need to go re download it. I added 3 more write the room activities. Check it out here.  This is on my kids favorite word work activities. 

I hope if you're at school today that you have a great Friday. It's my last day of Spring break and I plan on doing not much of anything. I would love to hear from you especially if you use any of these ideas for oviparous animals.