Teacher / Mother / Writer - A Portfolio

Are you interested in creating a classroom with more differentiated instruction? The acronym GEARS is a great tool to utilize. If you implement each of the five parts, you can reach the goal of creating differentiated instruction within your classroom that is accessible to all students. In order to best implement this strategy, you will need to have or be willing to do the following: Have educational/ personal preference information about each student Make time for planning appropriate, engaging activities  Continuously assess students in areas you’d like to see growth to see if goals are being met Frequent reflection on goals, activities, and assessment to see if there are changes needed to be made Going forward, I will explain what each letter in GOALS stands for and how it pertains to differentiated instruction G oals . You can’t get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going. Your classroom or individual student goals will help guide your activities and asses...

Small Group Ideas for Pre-K to Second Grade Classrooms When I think back to my 12 years of teaching kindergarten, my 4 sessions per day of meeting with my small groups always took me longest to plan out. I didn’t want to do the exact same activity every day although a certain skill may need several days of repetition and every group may not be working on the same skill.  But before thinking about specific activities, I first needed to decide what skills each of the groups needed reinforcement or enrichment in. For this information I would use daily, monthly, and quarterly data I was required to connect anyway. For our school, at the time, the major focus for our grade level was on phonemic awareness and phonics skills, but you can tailor your small group time to whatever subject area or skill your school may be focused on or based on the needs in your classroom.  In my small groups, I mainly focused on the following: DIBELS skills - Identifying beginning sound...

When I was teaching kindergarten, I used to tell people that I wasn't the stereotypical, sing-songy-voiced, sunshine and daffodils kinda teacher. I had my own way of connecting and communicating with my students that worked well for us. And now that I'm a new mom, I kinda find myself feeling the same way. I sometimes feel alone in my feelings and opinions as a first time mom. But on the off chance I'm not alone, I'm going to share with you some of the ways I feel like I'm stranger than your average mom and if you can relate, then you'll know you're not alone either. I love love LOVE my baby to pieces, but..... She's not sleeping in my bed. This is NO SHADE WHATSOEVER to moms who choose co-sleep. But for me, my bed is a place where I go to rejuvenate so I can wake up replenished and ready to care of my baby. If she was in bed with me, I'd NEVER get sleep. I'd be too busy checking whether she was a sleep...or breathing...or moving...o...

What do you do when your students are performing below state average in a certain subject area, like phonics and phonemic awareness?  One of the first things I would do is reflect on the instructional practices and activities I have been presenting and think about which elements were working for my students and which were missing the mark. I could use past assessments or assignments to detect any patterns of students not mastering a certain skill or concept. I could also reflect on whether my students have been successful in other academic areas in which I’ve used similar instructional practices and activities. The next things I would do is take an inventory of my students and take note of their individual learning styles and preferences and well as any areas in which they struggle. It is important to know how each best learns and what would peak each of their interests as a means to create the most engaging environment possible. In Teaching As Jazz, Tomlinson and Germundson (...

Every teacher is unique and has his/her own unique way of navigating his/her classroom. Some teachers are more type A and have charts and checklists to document student growth and neat and organized plan books with well thought out lesson plans and post-its next to each lesson telling them what they need to do to prepare for those lessons.  Other teachers are more organic. They have a great feel for their students and their strengths and needs and can plan fun and engaging lessons. To an outside eye, they may seem a bit scattered and unorganized but their students are just as successful as type A teacher’s students. So is planning and reflection as important for the “type A” teacher as it is for the “organic” teacher and all the other teachers that fall in between? Honestly, I think it depends on two things: the students in your class and your own instructional approach for your classroom . Let me explain. Let’s begin with the composition of your class. If you have...

I recently completed an online class called Try DI (differentiated instruction). The course I took prior to it, Why DI, described the benefits of DI and why every classroom teacher should consider implementing differentiated instruction into their classrooms. In Try DI, we learned strategies for how to implement DI into our individual classrooms. One assignment asked us to describe what we felt were the greatest and least impactful factors in making DI a reality in our teaching environments. We were given a handful of factors to pick from. The following is my response to this question based on my twelve years of experience working in a Title One school (a school with a high concentration of low income students that receives supplemental funding from the government to support its students and teachers in meeting educational goals), in a kindergarten classroom with an instructional aide who worked part-time in our class.  Least impactful factor in implementing DI- Not settling f...

Center Time- The Most Magical Hour of the School Day (This was written while I was still teaching kindergarten) Several years ago, our kindergarten team was inspired by our county's Language Arts office to revamp our one hour of center time. We all saw this hour as an awesome opportunity to help our struggling students and appropriately challenge our advanced students. We knew that it was going to take work, planning, organization, consistency, repetition, and good management for us to be as effective as possible during this hour. Today, center time is both my and my student’s favorite time of day. Here are some specifics as to why center time is such an academically rich part of our day: Each student is placed in one of four groups and I get to engage with each group for at least 12-13 minutes each day The students are grouped based on their ability levels and I am able to give direct, differentiated instruction and offer rigorous activities customized for each...