 So, welcome everyone to our webinar tonight. Thanks for joining me. I know it's always a little bit hectic that for school. I just literally ran in from picking up my son as well, so it's one of those fun days. But I'm thrilled you're here, and we've got some great stuff to talk about tonight. And like I said, don't hesitate to put something in the chat, or to pop in and ask questions. I don't think we'll need the full hour tonight, so we'll just jump in and see how we make out. So to remind you kind of where we've been, on day one we talked about instructional time and classroom design. And last day in November, you shared wonderful photos of some of the things you've been doing in your classroom to really make it a space that feels like a place where readers and writers live. And then on the last day, we talked about quite a few things. We talked about how to do diagnostic literacy assessments. We talked about how to group students, and really looked at strategy groups and how to model. And tonight we're going to look at differentiation. So we've got a couple ideas to share with you, and then we'll gear up for our last meeting together on March 14th. So like I said, we're going to start with a recap, sort of go back over what we talked about on November 30th. I'll spend some time defining what is differentiation, share a couple of classroom examples with you, a few thoughts on inclusion, and that should take us to the end for today. So thinking to November 30th, I guided reading, I gave you some charts that talked about behaviors to note. We spent a little bit of time talking about taking a good running record, and the most important part being how do you analyze that record? And we talked about looking at the errors that the children made and doing a miscue analysis. So we looked at did their errors make sense? Did they structurally represent a noun for a noun or verb for a verb? And we also looked at visually, did it look like they were attending closely to text so that the letters they chose were very similar? And I have one more tip just to share with you. Peter Bowers was in doing three days of sessions last week from Ontario, and he's all about structured word inquiry and looking at morphology and etymology. And he had a terrific tip when we start looking at children who make a miscue when they're reading out loud. He often just invites them to stop and spell out that word, letter by letter. And he said when he invites them to spell, it's a great cue because more than half the time he's found that kids can actually, when they stop and pause and take a minute to spell it, more than half the time they can actually figure out the word on their own. And sometimes it's just the pressure of reading out loud. And then if they don't know how to make sense of the word once they've spelled it, right, then that's when we can get into doing other things with them. But that's not so much to do on a running record, but if they happen to struggle when they're reading with us, I just thought that was a fabulous idea, just getting them to revisit it by spelling the word. Cuz that'll tell us a lot about whether or not they're recognizing key structures and words. So last time, in addition to all of this miscue analysis, we talked about a few thoughts about how you're gonna track all this. Do you have some kind of spreadsheet? Do you have observation notes? Do you have a clipboard? What do you do to kind of keep track of all the work that you're doing with your children and what you're observing them doing and where they need help next? We touched on the idea of whether you decide to sort by reading levels. So you create guided reading groups based on the abilities of your children. Or if you choose to focus more on strategy by strategy. So you group the kids when you notice that particular groups need a little bit review on a specific reading strategy. And finally, we reiterated the importance of modeling, doing think-alouds for kids. And I invited you to think about what good readers do and start to use that language with your own children. So at this point, I wanted to see if anyone had any, I don't know if it's good news to share or something they tried that they wanna share with us. So you can either type in the chat or you can jump on the microphone. But I would really love to hear just two or three shares about what somebody's been trying and how that went. So you can type, jump in and share. But I would like to wait for a minute. So if someone feels comfortable, I'd love to hear what somebody's tried. Thanks, I see Susan typing. I'm hoping one or two more folks will jump in and share as well. Thanks, Ranali. Maybe one more person willing to share. Restate, yeah, of course Amy. I really just wanna know, based on what we talked about on November 30th, did anyone go ahead and start looking at some guided reading groups? Did anyone try some diagnostic literacy assessments? Did anyone just even try a think-aloud with their kids? I'd love to hear what you guys have been up to since we met at the end of November. Okay, Susan, I'm just reading what you've written. So you've had kids really talking about the strategies they're using. And how did that go, Susan? I'm hoping that went well so far. Ranali said she's mixing guided reading groups by strategy. Ooh, less groups overall, that's an easier to manage. That's a great end result. Really good, nice Susan. So the kids themselves start to use this language. They know specific strategies, right? That whole push towards here's what good readers do. And I know what I'm doing as a reader. That's fabulous. I'll just wait to see what Heather's saying here. So I hope Heather, brainstorming, show not share. Nice. So that's all cool. Writing's great, we love writing. So it looks like some of you have had some success kind of moving towards this. And I know for next year, just imagine how well set up you're going to be to make some further progress. So I want to keep encouraging you to think about modeling, do think-alouds, and really think about that strategies. We spent some time talking about ensuring that kids get books at the right level. So I hope that that's been helpful in your work. And so yeah, we'll kind of jump in because a question I often get as I'm working with teachers is what do I do when kids are all at these different levels and this idea of differentiation? I know we throw this word around a lot. So today we just want to slow down and think about what it looks like in our reading classroom. And you know strategy groups is a perfect example as well as actually guided reading groups of differentiation because we are targeting what the kids need at their level or what the strategy that you notice they could really use help us. So you're already differentiating when you're using some of these strategies. But let's just jump into this concept a bit because like it says on the slide, differentiation isn't just about having different students do different things. Differentiate instruction is based on students' needs. So it really speaks to why we have kids do those differentiated literacy assessments because if I don't know what they need, I'm just guessing, right? And I'm just hoping I'm putting the right thing in front of them. So every time we manage to figure out maybe a little mini pretest, even if it's in our other subject areas, but if we have a quick little pretest to see how they're doing, whether it's on word work or some science concepts or math concept, really using our quick little checks just to sort of quickly sift and sort the kids who can do it and can't do it can be super helpful. Seeing if we can try to present our ideas in multiple ways. So maybe with a video or a listening task or hands on activity. So trying to come at it in different ways or even just simply offering some choice in their final whether it's the book they read or a project they do. All of that is tied on these beliefs around differentiation. And the really bottom line is that we all believe that students can learn in their own ways and in their own time. Even kids who are struggling readers and seem to be way behind their peers, they might just be on the journey, but you know, quite likely they're on the journey. They just are going to need more time at it. Even we've learned with some of our moderate to severely disabled children, even if at the scribble phase, a lot of researches have found that they're still on the journey and they can make progress. So we have to really believe that all kids can learn. Now, one thing I want to reiterate is we're not suggesting that you think about a differentiated classroom and feel like you have to start over or really reframe some things, but hopefully just building on your best practices and just layering on some intentional focused approaches. So it's not really a set of strategies. It's more about how we plan for our instruction. So let's jump in and share some ideas about this. Now, I have a video and Christina and I were chatting around if I help, if I play this video, I'm curious if you guys are going to be able to hear it. So let's just push play. And if it's not working or not hearing it, someone just jump in on the chat. Let me see if I can get this thing to play and see if you can see this. And if not, we'll, we'll skip it. But it is a short little video that I think can be quite helpful. So let me see if you guys have any sound on this. Is anyone hearing the sound? I'm not sure if you guys are going to get the sound. No sound, right? OK, no sound. All right. So sorry, it's been a while since I've shown a video. So you know what? You've got the link and I'm actually going to copy the link in the. I'm going to copy the link into our chat box. And if you have a little bit of time in your PJs tonight, maybe you want to grab this links and just take a quick peek. It's from it's an Alberta video. And it's just a really nice little overview of differentiation. So I've just put it in our in our chat box. Sorry about that. We'll just skip our videos tonight. So where are we at? OK, so here's a chart from Tomlinson. I believe it's Tomlinson. Oh, in the AACD group. So we've talked for years about what it is and what isn't. But I love this quick reminder. Differentiation is an idea as old as effective teaching. It's about valuing and planning for diversity. It's student focused. I like this phrase teaching up. And it's a use of whole groups, small group and individual tasks. It's it's really a necessary approach if we're truly going to try to support our broad range of learners. And we really look at patterns of student need because we still have to keep it manageable for us. But let's talk about what it's not. So the thinking here is it's not tracking or grouping students into classes by ability. So we're trying to avoid saying, well, you take all of these students and I'll take all of these students in my class. We don't really want to get too focused on ability. It's not about looking at remember the old days. I can't remember. I'm sure it was in these color groupings. But bluebirds, buzzards and wombats, you know, where you're a wombat all year. It's not this idea of dumbing down or for those children who get done early, they get extra. There's a yay. I finished my math. I get more worksheets. Yay for me. It's not just for anyone who we think of as gifted. It's not a particular set of strategies. So you're not going to try and find the right strategy and go, yay, I'm differentiating. It's not just for those with learning challenges. And it's not a set in them for group work or individualized instructions. So they're like, okay, what do we do with this? So let's look at it a different way. See if I can get my slide to advance here for you guys. So I really love this. Again, from the ASCD, there's four things that we focus on. And I'm sure this isn't new to you, but I really just want to put a bit of a language art spin on it for us today. We can choose to differentiate by content. And this is huge for us because this is just a matter of even selecting a different text that we choose slightly different content to put in front of our kids. Maybe we choose content that's at an easier or higher reading level. Right, so we think carefully about the content that we're putting in front of our kids. Process, for some kids, maybe they can just hear some auditory instructions and they're great. Other kids might need some visuals, maybe a step-by-step anchor chart on how to do a particular strategy. Or even as simple as a step-by-step anchor chart about how I turn and listen with a partner. So those kids just might need some of those visual and written down supports, so that's not always auditory. Product, is there different ways that kids can show us what they no understand and can do? Because I'm sure you've encountered kids who are not all great at writing out carefully structured sentences to give us complete answers. And yet maybe if I recorded them, they could still really explain to me what happened in their book or what they understood. So thinking about how can I still get understanding and know that they know it, but just vary how they turn that into me or demonstrate it to me. And then sometimes it's looking at the climate and tone of the classroom. And that's where we started on our first day. We talked about, yeah, what's our environment like? What would I notice if I walked in your room? Okay, so those are pieces to think about how might I differentiate. And the bottom three won't surprise you. It's about really trying to be close to their specified learning goals. What are they ready for? One of the writing feedback books I recently read was so fabulous because she uses beautiful language that says, wow, child, I can see that you did a fabulous job with your punctuation marks. And now I can tell that you are ready for X. She gives them the next thing they're ready for. So the kid actually feels quite proud that they're ready for the next strategy she's teaching them. Interests, we all know that interests are huge, that children are reading and writing in things that are meaningful to them and in their wheelhouse of background knowledge, things they like to read about. And finally, that learning profile that we have enough diagnostic information that we know our learners. Okay, so this is a huge chart and this is the anchor of what we're talking about today. So don't hesitate if you have questions or thoughts, jump in. But otherwise I'm going to give you a couple more examples specific to her work. So here's a chart that came from making a difference, Alberta Ed 2010, and they gave some examples. So let's start with read alouds. It says, sometimes it's simply choosing reading material to appeal to a wider range, right, of those student, personal, and cultural experiences. I like just the simple shift sometimes to simply informational text because we know sometimes boys prefer practical how-to text. So maybe the read aloud for the day is some really fascinating how-to steps on something. Maybe students have different options for how they respond to read alouds or give us feedback or share back what they heard in read alouds. So maybe not everyone has to draw a little three-panel comic strip after the read aloud. You know, maybe they have a different way of sort of capturing what they heard in that segment. It's just allowing some choice in what they hear, maybe how they give us back some content, thinking about those pieces. Let's look at independent reading now. It talks about, yes, we want to create class time for independent reading, and yes, we absolutely want them to be reading at home. So how can we differentiate? Well, looking in that classroom library, if you did a look through your classroom library and or your school library, are there both fiction and nonfiction texts there? Are there texts that are simpler? Are there texts that will challenge your higher readers? So even just looking at the options that you put in front of your kids. What about audiobooks? Are you comfortable having your children use audiobooks as part of their reading program? Do they get the option of maybe some texts that have that audio support so they can follow the story as they're listening or maybe use their finger to track as it reads to them? So what kind of supports can we put in place for that independent piece? And shared reading or the read-alongs. A risk-free environment so students of varied abilities feel comfortable to join in. So I'm thinking we talked about this, but we really don't want that round while I'm in reading where we go around to every child and have every child off the cuff just cold with no practice be asked to read in front of the class. Great. Well, that's not comfortable for a lot of children. But maybe we can just say, hey, how about everybody in row one? Could you read out loud for us? Or all the boys, could you read out loud? And all the girls read the next section so we can still do a little bit of that impromptu work, but in a low-risk feeling that actually maybe feels more fun. Differentiated assignments. Again, like we talked about, maybe one group looks at word families while another group's ready to compose a story. So just thinking about how I can honor all my readings but stay using the same text, for example. OK, so I've got some more ideas here for you. We've talked about the gradual release to responsibility. So that talks about typically the teacher models first. So I do, if I look at the bottom of the chart, I do. And then I do with some help. So that's usually the shared piece. Then I'm looking at them. You do often in partners or together with me to support. And hopefully then they get to the you do and the independent. So how do I scaffold this? I could read to a student. I could add some symbols. Like we could do shared reading all out loud together. Maybe I set up book clubs or literature circles. What else is on here? They work in small groups, inquiry. They actually pursue their own questions. And what's the last piece? Independent reading of process. Right, just that we finally feel like we get them to the part where they're choosing their own material, they're happy, they're making good choices, and it's making sense. Okay, so I don't think this will be surprising to you, but to think about where you add in this I do, we do, you do. Do you feel like you're there yet? Spot the difference. Here's our game, everybody. Let's see if we can tell the difference. So let's look at Phil. Phil has three reading groups in his fourth grade classroom. At the beginning of the year, he conducts an informal reading inventory with each child. So he's done that diagnostic assessment, he's then sorts the students into three groups of equal size. So he's got a high group with, let's just say six kids, the middle group with six kids, and maybe the low group with six kids. So for the remainder of the school year, he uses fourth grade text with the middle group, third grade text with the low group, and fifth grade text with the high group. Does that sound like differentiation? You know, some might say yes, right, because he's got texts at all three levels, and I know how there's hopefully a lot of different and I know Heather's hopefully throwing in her thoughts here, and anyone's welcome to jump in, is this differentiation? He knows his learners, he's putting different texts in front of them, and I've got a couple of notes. So let's look at, it's different, but here's differentiated. Let's see what Jill does. In September, Jill took three running records on each of her first graders, which means she listened to them do a quick read three separate times. Based on their instructional levels, she created four reading groups. Every three weeks, she took an additional running record on each student and changed her groups to reflect students' new instructional levels. Over the years, she had from three to six groups depending on these results. So do you see how just with some subtle ability to take a running record super quick, she was able to be far more responsive to her kids. And I'm sure we talked about this, but using our diagnostic reading where we have the official book from the assessment kit, we have that official piece of paper with all of the text from the book in front of us, right? We can do a very official assessment, and those are powerful, but you know what? Jill could sit beside a child who reads 30 words, and she could literally have a white piece of paper and just say, hey, can you read this one page to me and do a whole series of check marks and annotations about any errors they made on that one page of text. So in two minutes, she could take a running record on a child. Has anyone done these impromptu, really quick running records? Can you guys know how to use your show of hands? So if I went, do you guys know how to find that show of hands at the top of your, at the top of your participant box? There's Heather's hand up, nice. So if you've done a really impromptu, quick running record like that without even having that separate piece of paper with the full text on it, I've got Nicola, nice. So a few of you are trying that. So I'm gonna encourage you, especially in our busy days, maybe just try a quick running record on some of those kids that you wanna do a check in on. Don't feel like you have to get the whole official assessment kit going, and just try a quick running record and see if that gives you helpful data. You still wanna count how many words they read, and then you wanna do a check for how many errors they made out of total words. Because remember, we're still targeting independent and instructional reading levels, so we still need to have a sense of what percentage are they at. Right, if they're at 94%, 97%, 99%, so we still want that quick check. All right, so are you ready for the next one? Let's see what's the next one. All right, another example. Debra. Debra is teaching her fifth graders how to write persuasive essays. She develops three different prompts for them to choose from. Students can write an essay to convince their parents to get a pet, to persuade the principal to extend recess time, or to ask their favorite author to come to class. All right, so we got some differences. So now I'm gonna pause. I want you guys to go into your chat, and I want everyone to put down a thought. How could Debra differentiate a little bit more for her students? Content, process, product, interests. Think about something Debra could do to be a little bit more differentiated for her learners. Nice, I see some folks typing already. I'm just gonna wait a minute. What can Debra do differently? Persuasive essays, three different prompts. Does someone wants to say it out loud, jump in? Okay, so I see different marking criteria. Yep, student response options. Checklist, criteria, you guys are on the same page. Instead of an essay, have some students use a presentation approach. Right, why can they do a persuasive speech? Change the product. List ideas, draw a picture. How about a persuasive poster? Why do I think of that old American army poster with the guy pointing, you, right? So get creative and have them, right? Offer some options because let's face it, if I didn't wanna talk about getting a pet, I don't want more recess time or I'm not excited about a favorite author, right? None of these three prompts might spark for me. And so my thought here is simply let them choose. I might brainstorm with the class so that nobody's stuck, but I might actually open it up that they can write a persuasive essay on anything. Right, yeah, persuasive speech. So let's just see on the slide. Let me just see what the differentiated option was. Let's see what Rachel does here. Rachel teaches her third grade class of writing, meaning lesson about dialogue. She circulates the room as students write and jots down the names of students, her experimenting with dialogue and their writing, noting their use of quotation marks. During independent writing time, she pulls the group of students who were not punctuating their dialogue and teaches them a mini lesson on quotation marks. Then she pulls the group of students who were using them correctly and introduces the concept of indenting for new speakers. Okay, so I know it's a totally different example, but do you see how she quickly does a snapshot? Okay, who's doing it? Perfect, let me give them a nudge ahead. And those that aren't quite there yet, let me pull them aside. Far more effective than stopping the whole class and revisiting with the whole group how to do quotation marks. Okay, so this is a great example of, wow, you guys are ready for this next step. And look how proud they feel like, cool, we're ready for indenting. And kids who hadn't even figured out quotation marks yet are certainly not ready for indenting. So just another example to think about. And here's an interesting little fun fact for you tonight. Universal Design for Learning, I'm hoping you've heard this phrasing before, was really developed around sidewalks. How cool is that? So you think about architecture, you think about design sidewalks with curb cuts before they were built in order to support wheelchairs. Right, because originally people said, hey, let's make this curved part. And everybody's thinking, well, that's a lot of work for wheelchairs, but okay, let's design it right away so nobody has to come in afterwards and do an expensive cut with some of that equipment. Let's just put it in the design. So they're okay, that's good. Hope all the wheelchair folks, that works great. And then all of a sudden, guess what they figured out? That, oh, look, they're good for strollers, bikes, skateboards, et cetera. So look at how one little design component to really support folks who were in wheelchairs became this thing that everyone could use and that they used in ways that people hadn't even planned for or anticipated. So that's what UDL's about. When we put solid strategies out there, room for choice, room to show us in different products, it's good for all. Okay, so we're not just targeting our kids that we perceive as being struggling children, we are targeting children that we feel like could benefit from some options. And let's face it, some of our kids, I'm that kid, I like variety. So if you put some variety, I am way more excited about the task than if you make all of us write the same speech or do the same essay. And as a teacher, I sure like when I don't have to read 20 of the same speech or essay either. So I'm putting in the chat the second video that we're not gonna watch. Did anyone see, I'm gonna look for your hands again, so put your hands up if you get a minute. Did anyone see Shelly Moore last year or this year when she's come to Edmonton? She's from BC, she's actually a grad from Edmonton. And Shelly Moore is doing a lot of work in inclusive Ed, so I'm just curious if anyone has seen her video or seen her present. I'm not seeing any hands up. Okay, just feedback, I wanna talk about her if you've all seen her. So I really, really suggest you take a quick peek, it's a super fun video. She actually put this video together with some colleagues to apply for some grant funding and she actually won. She put the best video together and she won some grant funding from this amazing little video, so it's kind of fun, but she has this great analogy and she talks about supporting kids and she got going on this bowling analogy and I don't know if we have any bowlers here tonight, but she talked about how the hardest shot to make was what we call the 7-10 split and it's those darn pins at the end of the bowling lane. Has anyone had this where you knock down all the middle and then you're going, oh great, now look what I've got left. I've got those darn pins on each end and so what she talks about in this video is who are the kids that are hardest to get, those ones on the outliers, right, are gifted and are struggling and so often we aim for the middle. Does this sound familiar to anyone? And so then she said, really, if you're gonna make this shot, you actually don't aim for the middle. You aim off-center and it happens to knock them all down. So she talks about instead of aiming for a middle, we change our aim a little bit. It's a great little quick video so I highly recommend if you have a minute, go check it out, but the analogy is don't just aim straight down the middle. Okay, so think about all of our kids and just start thinking about how can we put a shot out that'll take them all down? That will support them all in their literacy so that's kind of what we're aiming for. So this is a chance where everybody can do some thinking here for a minute, I'll pause. What strategies and routines are working well for you and your classroom? Have you figured out some things that seem to hit kids at all the levels that kind of knock all those pins down? So if you have some strategies or tips for each other, I want you to take a minute and type something in the chat. And I don't think we can answer this one necessarily, but I'm gonna invite you to think about how do we reach those hardest-to-reach students? How do we get lessons that are good for all? So I'm gonna pause. Do you have any tips for how are you working to differentiate for your students? I hope you guys have some answers. Okay, people should be writing guided reading, books at multiple levels, help me out everybody, you must be doing things. I know you're doing things to support your students. You're giving them choices, getting to know your learners. Yay, mini-lessons, right? So you can pull in, Nicholas. I'm hoping you're saying that, right? You can just do mini-lessons and maybe target certain kids. Fabulous, using RAS reading, nice. So let's use some of the tools out there to make this doable. Angela, can you help me, are you getting them to give feedback on the books they read? Do they get to choose which books they read? Can you help me understand what you're saying with that? Or maybe there's a little student survey I don't know about. Heather's talking about giving choices, mini-lessons, exemplars, oh, perfect, right? So they can start to do their own self-assessment around exemplars, highlighting what's working. Nice, so some self-reflection. Amy's saying lessons that target different ways of learning, yeah. Oh, so like multiple intelligence is almost making hot chocolate, the steps, instructions, brainstormed. Perfect, so they had experiences that they could connect to and think about. Right, so Angela, you're saying that even just in those levels, that's helping them. Great, Emily, right, Emily, you're not teaching L.A., but present the answers different ways. Wonderful, so room for choice in how they share their learning. Just going for the last couple here. Right, so I'm hoping you're seeing some things and you're going, yeah, I'm already on this differentiation path, and that's fabulous. And keep thinking about ways to try to hit down more of those pins. So how could I look at those strategy groups? Or how could I put more choices than just the persuasive essay out there? How can I give the kids a couple of different examples of persuasive texts? All right, so I'm catching up to Ronaldine said, right, books in your classroom library across A to P, right? Busy books, they do independently, all the books are different, nice. Small group instruction, perfect. And many lessons on setting, nice. So you guys are already finding tools and ways to support the kids, so I'm gonna encourage you to keep doing that because we know nowadays our children need, right? Lots of supports, lots of places that they can show what they know. How do you design lessons with your hardest to reach in mind? Shelly Moore suggests that, now I think she gave some great examples from math and social studies, but she suggested that she starts her lessons at the understanding level, if you will, of her lowest student. So that every student kind of has that start point of the lesson, and then as we start to get more challenging, she might take those children that need to sort of be sidelined maybe into similar work, but at their level, and then she can keep progressing with the other students. Well, guess what I'm gonna give you a concrete example of this. She was coaching teachers working on a math lesson, and they said, well, we're gonna do some work around the sides of a triangle and figuring out which sides are longest and some correlations around sides of triangles, and she said, okay, but you only have a couple of those children at the bottom that barely know what triangles are. She said, let's all start with a sorting triangles lesson that every child in that class can do, and then the children that need to spend way more time just really getting this, the gist of a triangle can do some cut and paste and glue and sort and can stay there, whether the rest of your kids, you then quickly take them up to the triangle concept of the day. But what she says by starting with the lowest, the entry point, almost a step below your lowest child, all children are on the triangles topic, so they're all inclusive, that they're all talking about triangles in that room that day. They are able to talk to one another, they are able to ask questions of one another, and it just feels like that positive environment where you're not this person totally sidelined in a corner on a totally different topic, whereas the rest of the class on triangles. So I hope that makes sense. So she often encourages teachers when possible to think about this, how could I do that as my start point for my lesson that's inclusive to all my children and then I'll start to differentiate and ladder up for the class as we start moving forward. So just food for thought. I thought it was a lovely suggestion and yeah, see if that helps you at all. There's not much more to share, except I just wanted to point out that there's a number of resources. Albert Education has an inclusive education library and there's actually rubrics, four language arts on that site. Literacy for All was a site we made for supporting children with moderate and severe learning disabilities and you'll see a lot of the strategies. They won't be surprising. In fact, if I scroll back to who shared their hot chocolate example, that would be a perfect example of something they would have done with their literacy for all. They would have had a common experience of say carving a pumpkin. They would have written some shared writing to do some sentences around the steps and then maybe the kids would have sifted and sorted the words of those sentences in the right order or practice copying them. So very similar strategies to what I know you're already doing. We've posted on a few more pieces here. Some more is Shelly Moore's blog so she usually has some inclusive ad tips and the only other one on the bottom of the page is called Newzella. And Newzella has book, sorry, current events that are written daily by a series of writers and you can get each article at five reading levels. So if the current event article was on frogs in the wetland and maybe something specific about the frogs, I can assign or copy PDFs of that article at five different reading levels that I can give to my children. And what I love about that is it just honors exactly what we were just talking about with Shelly Moore. All my kids will be on the same article. It'll be at an article at their proper reading level. They can still talk to one another and pull out big ideas and then we can turn and even have different resulting products or sentences or ways of showing their understanding from the article. Maybe one group's ready for annotating. Maybe another's ready for inferencing. But using tools like Newzella, there's one called Dogo News. Has anyone heard of Newzella or Dogo News? It's like D-O-G-O News. And again, they're written for children at different levels. And so if you haven't used it, I encourage you to check them out. Newzella goes down to about a grade three reading level typically and it goes sort of from grade three reading level to grade 12. So it's not for the little ones. It's more for our two kids. But it's a free membership. You don't really need the premium membership but it's free to sign up with the school district email and take a peek. You don't have to sign up to see their articles. Check it out. Because again, that may be another source of current events and current articles. They have new sets from science, art, social studies, all sorts of fun topics. St. Patrick's Day. There's lots of great little articles in that one. So I often love sharing that one with teachers. So with that, you guys, we're kind of on the wrap up. Next time we're gonna talk about writing, conferring, interventions, tracking progress again. And then my favorite, I love talking about word work and some oral language. I've got fabulous strategies to share with you. You're absolutely gonna love the fun strategies we're gonna do next day. And yeah, and then we'll have one more webinar. So if everyone just wants to put sort of a closing thought, what are you thinking about differentiation? Is there one aspect that comes to mind that you're thinking about or that you know you might wanna delve into or perhaps a tool or that video you wanna go back to? So if everybody could just share sort of their closing thought, then that will take us to kind of a close for tonight. And if you have questions by all means, now's the time. Yeah, options, right? I love giving kids. I will give them some solid topics but then I'm definitely gonna let them have that room for their own topics, definitely. Or different ways of showing. If they can come up with another way of showing what they know, I am all for it. And by the way, one rubric, no matter how they show me what they know, one rubric with criteria. Can you show me that you? You know, A, understood. B, you know the main idea. I can use one rubric even though they might show me in four different ways what they understood. So it still keeps it manageable for us. Amy, you're saying that starting with, right, starting with that lowest student and building up. I'd love for you guys to try it and give me some feedback. I just love that idea. Yeah, keep thinking about how to put different choices in front of kids. Not too many choices, we don't wanna cripple them but just give them some personalization there. Same story, different levels. Right, try out, try out Dogo News, Newzella. There's a number of the sites. Okay, so Nicola too, the same thing Nicola about lowest easiest starting point. That just really appeals to me because I love having all my kids on the same topic. Even if I just wanna talk about lit circles and but all looking at character or lit circles and we're all looking at setting in the book we're reading, right? Right, so really thinking about how to make sense of lots of different texts but just have that one focus point. How did this character in my story solve the problem? What was the problem in my story? What's it some descriptive words that my author used? So really making use of diverse texts but coming at it so the same topics and we all share or maybe story beginnings or story endings even though we all have different books. Yeah, yeah, so keep exploring and it's not that we differentiate every moment, every day, all the time, because we are teachers and sometimes things happen whole group but when we have opportunities to differentiate that is powerful. I'm looking at Brandy, quick running records. Thank you for the reminder. I'm encouraging all of you to try the quick running records and if it didn't make sense, you wanna email me, don't hesitate any time to just say share or remind me what that is but honestly it's you walking around with a white piece of paper and a pencil and having that child read to you and I make a check mark for every word they read right and I literally make a note of what they should have said and how they made the mistake and the reason I do check marks is then I can use those to count and total up how many words they read. Yeah, don't forget your higher students because my son was a rock star at math but guess what? If he got his math dootang done early, hey, more math. So be careful what we do with our gifted students and how do we push them in the same topic but maybe just to have some more challenging tasks that they can opt to do but on the same topic with the same readings just a little bit higher level. Like our example earlier about quotation marks, some are ready for indenting, some are maybe ready to change up. He said, she said, he whispered, she exclaimed, right? We can all be on dialogue but we can figure out ways to ladder it up or ladder it down so while the whole class is talking about dialogue, we're just finding ways to nudge kids that are ready. I love your feedback, I really appreciate everyone taking the time to help. Angela, great question. How do we help the higher students? You know, oftentimes I look at things like Bloom's taxonomy and I think about how can I maybe get them doing more of those comparing, contrasting, evaluating. How might you've changed or what's a different way that could have been written or I don't know, would you've made the same choice so you evaluate? That's a simplistic answer but Angela, I've got a couple of things around critical thinking that I will bring to our next session. Thank you for the question and I will see if I can bring a few more things to Spark that how do I help those higher level children? And I will make a note of that right now, fabulous question. Does anyone else have any homework for me for our next session of things you want us to think about? And if you think of some, I'm just gonna put up my email, you are always welcome to email me and even if you forget my email, just say, hey, I have a literacy question and send it to our Info at ERLC account and it always gets forwarded to me. So with that, if you think of something else you want me to do and to include next time, don't hesitate to pass it along and otherwise I thank you for joining me on a busy school night and for being patient with me, just being a few minutes late, getting to the microphone. So all the best everyone, happy February this week and I hope you guys have a fabulous conventions and we'll see you in March.