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. 

Visual Plans (kind of)

So I have been admiring Mrs. Deedee Wills visual plans for a long time. She's definitely one of my favorite bloggers. She started a linky party not too long ago for sharing of the visual plans. I have been wanting to link up for a while but I've not had time to sit down and try to make some visual plans. I'm pretty excited about what I've got planned this week with oviparous animals, so I decided to give it a shot. I only did my reading plans. I figured this was a way to get my feet wet.
You can click on the link to take you to a pdf that has the plans. Within the plans there are several links you can take to find some great resources. There are a couple of freebies. One is from me and I'll talk about it a little more in a minute. There are also links to some great units on TPT that I'm using this next week.

Click here to go to the pdf to find the awesome resources.

Now a little explanation of my freebie. It's an anticipation guide. Did you learn about those in college and then promptly forget about them once you started teaching like me? No, I'm the only one. I hope not. I'm so guilty of learning some great strategies along the way and then forgetting about them once I'm back in the classroom. Our school system has bought a subscription the website www.pd360.com. Have you heard of it? We got an email about it like weeks before we received any training. We then had a day of training and playing on it and I forgot about it. It's a database of professional development videos. I'm sure there is more to it than that but that's as much as I've explored. Yesterday, I spent a little time looking at some videos about differentiated instruction. This is something I've really been wanting to work on this year. I got a couple of great ideas from the videos and I've reflected a few of them in my plans. One of the big things emphasized in several of the videos was giving kids choice. So when they recreate the life cycles of chicken and frogs, I'm going to give them some choices. They can draw it or they can use the cut and paste that is found in Kaci's units.
Then the other strategy was the anticipation guide. The idea is to get the kids to activate their prior knowledge on a topic when beginning a unit. So I created one about oviparous animals. (You can find this freebie in my plans.)

Have you ever used anything like this when starting a unit? Do you have access to professional development like this? I would love some comments, especially on my visual plans since it's my first time trying this out. Be sure to head over to Mrs. Wills Kindergarten and check everyone else linking up.

Wintery Science Activites

Well, I'm home today for a snow day. It has been a weird week of weather. Tuesday and Wednesday we were out for flooding. Then Thursday we got out an hour early. Snow was pouring by the time I got home and the road to my house was already covered. It was so beautiful. But today the sun is shining thankfully. We haven't had sun in over a week. And the snow is melting. I had plans of teaching all about MLK jr. this past week. But with no school, it just didn't happen. It think I'm going to have to let go of some of the activities though. Friday we have to have our science fair projects completed. Every grade level in my K-8 to school participates in Science fair. In kindergarten and first grade, we do a class project. And I haven't even started on ours yet. My plan for this year was to do the Crisco blubber project. I think I did it last time I was in First grade. But this year, I plan to add a research component for my kids with it.
So I wrote this on Friday and never got around to finishing it. I was busy this weekend with a fundraiser for the student at my school who was recently diagnosed with cancer. It was amazing to get to talk to people about him and to hear others stories about their experiences with cancer. We got to meet this 5 year old boy who had beat liver cancer. He was so cute showing us his scar and he told us that Jesus healed him. It was so cool. I had to really struggle not to cry when he was telling us his story. Anyway,. I took a little break from blogging and such this past weekend.
Today we started talking about polar animals and the arctic to get ready for our science fair project.I had seen this idea on someone's blog. (I can't find it again. I had thought it was The Teacher's Cauldron or Tunstell's Teaching Tidbits but I couldn't find it on either one) where you put pictures around the room with paper and let the students look at the pictures and then add their questions and ideas. So I googled some images on Arctic animals and got this set up.

I put pictures of different polar animals and then a couple of scenery pictures. The kids walked around the room and looked at them and then I let them sit at each table for about 3 minutes and add their thoughts and questions.

After they wrote their questions and ideas, we read them over and dismissed some errors to their thinking. Like that polar bears are nice. Then we made a circle map of the Arctic on the promethean board.

We also read a book about the North Pole, South Pole.

This gave us some new information. My plan had been to add some more to our chart but when we finished the book it was lunch time and we had to move on to other things. So tomorrow, we're going to add to our chart and do some writing about polar animals. This is our research for our science fair project. I have a couple of great packs from some of my blogging friends that are going to help with our research. The first is from Jennifer Kadar at Simply Kinder.

The second is from Maggie at Maggie's Kinder Corner. She has a pretty cool unit about Animals and Plants in Winter. You can check it out here.

Both of these items will help with our research and our presentation about the animals. I'll be back later this week to tell you more about our science.

A peek at my week and a freebie

It has been too long since I've posted. I no longer have internet at my house so it makes my blogging time difficult. I'm hoping my husband is on getting internet at our house again. Life has been kind of crazy lately. I don't think that I've shared on here that I was called for Jury duty. So far I've only had to report one day for orientation. I was suppose to report tomorrow and Wednesday but we're testing so I'm excused. On top of that, I have been having issues with my right knee. It's bothered me off and on since I was in high school after I had a skiing accident. But this past month and half it's been awful. So I went to the doctor and was told I have arthritis in my knee and referred to a specialist. Friday I saw the orthopedic doctor and got some bad news. The arthritis is caused by a torn acl. So I've had a torn acl for the past 15 years. I knew when I had my skiing accident I was hurt but I really didn't think it was that bad and I was scared to tell my parents. I was afraid they wouldn't let me ski. I continued to ski and play soccer throughout high school. Whoops. So now I'm looking at a total knee replacement if I don't correct this problem soon. I have a MRI Wednesday and meet with the doctor again a week from today. So hopefully I'll know more then. Chris is going to go with me since I didn't think of all the questions I needed to ask. Anyway, so that's the craziness that is my life. I really want to get back into sharing what's going on in my classroom so I thought I would share what we're up to this week.
In reading, we're still working on building up stamina for daily 5. We've built up to 20 minutes for read to self and we're holding steady there for a little while. We've slowly been building up stamina for read to someone. I think we're up to 8 minutes. We've also been working on building stamina for working on writing. I'm not sure how I'm feeling about daily 5 so far. I think I'll be more on board once everything is in place. This week I'm introducing some working with word activities. We're going to use magnetic letters, stamping, a game, and a magazine hunt. (These activities can be found in my Words that Pop Up unit) I think that by introducing some of the activities I want them to choose from, it will help us when we start building up stamina. We're also working on incorporating some reader's workshop ideas. I have been enjoying Kim Adsit's Reading workshop units. They have some great lessons in them. This week we're working on some mini-lessons from the book Growing Readers. The kids have brought in their favorite books and we're going to share them and look for things that are the same and things that are different. We're also going to work on sketching our favorite reading memories.We started the reading series last week but in the midst of all our testing we didn't quite finish what we needed to do. So we're continuing with that.
In math, we're working on addition. We've been working on different ways to make numbers so adding in addition sentences isn't too much for them. I'm pretty disappointed in myself though. I haven't been able to get math workstations going yet. We had some introductory time with the manipulatives but that's about as far as I got. I have a few activities that are set up and ready to go but I need to just bite the bullet and finish getting them together. I did make a game that I'm super excited to use this week. It's called paw prints addition scoot. It's a scoot game with three different versions working on addition problems with numbers 0-5. I have it up on my TPT store for $3.00. You should check it out here.
We started some science last week. We just talked about what scientist do and then did the mentos and coke experiment. I was definitely the coolest teacher Thursday afternoon. This week we're talking about what tools scientist use. I plan to use the mystery box to introduce a few of the tools to them. We're also going to be working on using our senses and being scientist. They are going to find something outside to observe and recording their observations on the following sheet. (This is where the freebie comes in)

I'm so excited to be sharing a freebie with you. Maybe this means I'm getting the hang of school again. At least for now. I hope to be back later this week with some more information involving math work stations and a science experiment. So be sure to check back.

Is it spring break yet?

Yesterday I was so cranky. I just wanted spring break to be here. I'm exhausted and my kids are exhausted. We haven't had a day off since February and they are tired of each other. Which is in turn making me cranky. I can not handle the fighting anymore. Monday and Tuesday were great days. But Wednesday they just couldn't hold it together. It could be because we spent about an hour and half at a play yesterday morning. It was an awesome play put on by the middle school kids at my school of Alice and Wonderland. But it was not their usual routine and they had to sit for a long time. And be quiet for a long time. So they took all this out of me and I was cranky by the end of the day. Luckily I had a date with my cutie pie niece, Sophie after school. That instantly brightened my day.

So I haven't gotten all the egg activities and insect activities finished that I wanted to this week. I think I'm going to continue some of the egg activities the week after we get back from Spring break. I think they'll make good Math centers. Is that awful of me? Will the kids be over Easter eggs when it's a week past Easter? I have such a hard time getting everything in. I plan stuff and then other things take too long.
We're still going to be working on ladybugs a bit since we're "raising" some. I'm hoping that they won't turn into full adult ladybugs until after we get back from Spring break. According to a book we read, we should be ok. We stared a life cycle picture. All we've done so far is the eggs and the larva stage. I wanted them to use the ladybugs we have to draw their pictures from.
Meanwhile, we're going to keep a ladybug journal. I've made a template to share with you. My new favorite way to share documents is scribd. I like that I can see how many times it's downloaded. The clipart is from Graphics from the pond and the 3 AM teacher.

Ladybug Journal It's amazing how many people download things and don't leave any comments. I use to be guilty of that. I'll admit it. When I first started blog stalking, I would download tons of free resources and never leave any love for the blogger. But I've turned over a new leaf. I try really hard to comment on all blogs I get things from. I know how happy it makes me to hear someone has used something I worked hard on. I say this not to toot my horn or beg for comments. But just to make you think. I really make a concious effort to comment on blogs I read and leave a word of encouragement. Of course I'm no where as viligant about it as Jennifer from First Grade Blue Skies. She's so awesome and always leaving a word of encouragement on my blog and others. So you should check her out and leave her some love if you haven't yet.








Please leave me some comment love if you download the ladybug journal or even if you don't. I love comments. They brighten my day. They make this last day and half before spring break bearable. If you don't leave me a comment, you should at least check Jennifer out and leave here some love.

Spring has sprung

This is the lady bug home with a few larvae crawling around.

Spring has definitely sprung in my room. We finished up our plant unit this week on Monday by planting our seeds. I used Abby's Mystery box activity to add some mystery to the seed planting project. I wish I had taken a picture of my box. It's super cute. I used the box my Blogging Exchange Friend, Amy, sent me during the valentine's day exchange. It was perfect. I'll have to take a picture this week. I'm using it again on Monday to introduce my kids to our new friends, the ladybugs. This week we started our unit on insects. Our reading series had us read a book about Beetles and then we read The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle. I had other books I wanted to read but we just didn't seem to get to them. So I decided to extend insects into another week. This week is our last week before Spring break so I thought it would be ok to take a break from our usual reading series. I figured it out and we finish up our reading series by the first of May so an extra week won't be a big deal. I ordered the ladybug larvae from Insectlore and it came on Friday. I was expecting eggs but instead go a few baby ladybugs. I really hope they haven't transform med into the ladybugs over the weekend. I haven't introduced them to the kids yet.
We made some ladybugs and incorporated a little math into it. They had to make an addition sentence out of the number of dots they put on the bug. I've been so inspired by several blogs to incorporate more art into my day. But I'm a firm believer that it needs to be student created. I don't do patterns but have the students follow directions to create things. This is my way of incorporating some common core into the art projects. The listening standards apply well here. I also don't have a lot of copies to use on creating patterns for the students.

This coming week I plan to do a little more with The Grouchy Ladybug and hopefully a nonfiction book about ladybugs. I guess I need to hope they have one in the library. We're also going to read The Hungry Caterpillar and The Lonely Firefly. I also have some fun Easter activities planned with the plastic Easter eggs from the dollar tree. I hoped to have made the activities and post them today. But those freebies will have to come later. I do want to tell you about my newest item in Teacher's Notebook and Teachers Pay Teachers. It's Buggy for Words. Included in this packet are a game with Fry's phrases on it, some letter cards for word building and a some word cards for sentence building. They all have a bug themed. I made something similar for Valentine's day and used it with my kids I tutor. This time around I included a star e for a little magic e work for some of my higher kids. I busted the letter cards out last week and you would have thought it was something so cool just because I changed the clipart. Here are a couple of pictures of what is included and the item in action:

If you are interested in purchasing these items, click here for Teacher's Notebook and here for Teachers Pay Teachers. ** Update ** I added a free preview you can download of one of the games. So check it out!
I would love to get some feedback on my items. So the first 3 people to check out one of my stores and leave a comment with one of my items you would like, I'll send it to you for free. But you are committing to giving me some feedback on my items. I probably won't get anything out to you until tomorrow morning. How has spring sprung in your room?