Week 10- Going Strong

     I officially started full-time teaching and the implementation of my action research. I have learned a lot already. After planning my first week of 30 minute whole group instruction, 30 minutes of English grammar, and differentiated stations, I can tell you it is no small task. In particular, it has been a struggle to correspond both stories together so that students can find things to talk about. The 6 students that are pulled for intensive instruction with a special education teacher are reading a story that is on their Lexile level but has the same theme and vocabulary words as the story that our class does. I feel that although it is a struggle to try and tie the stories together, it is important that they gain confidence within the general education classroom.
     Part of the instruction is to complete an independent activity that is on their instructional level and to then use "chat" questions to discuss the themes of the stories with a member from their heterogeneous group. The problem that I have encountered this far is that although they do share the same vocabulary words, they do not have the same events. However, all students are researching social studies and science themes that emerge between both, such as conservation and protect of resources.
     I also am having students complete exit tickets that have participants identify strategies used and how they could use the techniques learned in the future. The problem I'm encountering is that during station time, we are also pulling students by homogenous groupings for required grammar lessons that take about 30 minutes. This disrupts learning from the stations and then students have a difficult time trying to gain focus on the original task. Students are not completing those activities within the first rotation, so a second rotation is required for many students to finish. However, by that time, some of the students are finished and do not have something to do. I'm struggling to identify which activities to grade because students are always at different places in their learning, which is fine, but hard to assess and keep everyone working.
     I'm thinking that since we stay on the same story for 2 weeks, their first take will be to finish the original, then to have students complete a smaller independent activity, or pull students for grammar that have finished activities first, giving the others time to complete an activity.