Whoooo's Ready To Teach: Differentiated Core Cards

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Differentiated Core Cards

We have only four more days of school! How many do you have? We are super excited to have the summer to create more teaching products. Our latest product is the brainchild of our evaluation! Yes, I said it-our evaluation. Differentiation was an area that we could "grow" in! So even though, in my classroom, I prepare 20 different individualized spelling lists weekly, make five levels of fluency passages for my students, work with small groups in reading, writing, and math, I still need to grow. And I know that Emily also differentiates a lot. But grow we will!!!

Anyways, we decided to make task cards but we wanted our task cards to be different. We wanted three levels of task cards so we made 12 cards per level. We also wanted an Exit Slip so we created one for each level. We started brainstorming names and graphics for our cards and ended up with the name Differentiaton to the Core. We loved the apple graphics at Scrappin Doodles and decided to use them to create our differentiation code. Let me show you the code that we designed (with the help of our friend and colleague, Becky Butler).

The full apple represents your group of students that are not quite up to "core".
These students need more of the apple to grow.

This symbol represents your "core" groups of students or your students at grade level.

This symbol represents your "above core" group. These students need only half of the apple
but also need more seeds planted to continue making growth.

You might be wondering how we came up with the levels and pictures. We specifically did not want students to be able to identify the levels by looking at the apples. We wanted students at the lowest level to see a full apple. By placing the "core" in the middle, the levels are very tricky to distinguish.

I used the cards for the first time and I can't wait to tell you about that but I'll save that for tomorrow's blog post.