Ability Grouping - Part 1

Oh.... ability grouping! It's one of the things that I get most excited about (when I think of something good!) But, I also fear that it will become my worst enemy come observation time. Last year, I thought I had a pretty good system down. Let me tell you about it...

Here is a view of my ability grouping last year (we ended up in horse shoe groups toward the end, and unfortunately I do not have a picture- but that worked really well!)

Let's start with the peanut butter and jelly's on their desk.  This was their ability grouping for discussions and partner work for the most part. Throughout my lessons I would have peanut butter questions (for the higher students) and jelly questions (for the lower students). My PB ?'s were usually from the upper half of blooms and my Jelly's were usually remembering/understanding and sometimes applying. 

I used my PB and J's a lot in math too. Many times when we would do guided practice, my jelly's would work out the problem on their whiteboard in front of their partner and my peanut butters would give academic feedback. It worked really well and required the PB's to pay attention to be able to give that academic feedback. They were also good at probing the jelly's just as I would if I were in front of them. 

Then on the front of their folders they have two dots. The right dot was for reading and the left dot was for math. I assigned their dots based on their AIMS scores from last year for the most part. However, there were those students that did not do well on AIMS and they were my high students most of the time, so I went with what I saw most of the time in my classroom.

I mainly used these coloring dots for differentiated work, especially in reading. For vocabulary, spelling, and for our focus lessons, I would have 4 different activities prepared. Exceeds, high, medium, and low. If they finished early they could go grab from the color ahead of them (enrichment). 

However, I did use this when I was forming groups for different assignments. I usually tried to have one of each color in our groups. Depending on the activity sometimes I would change it up a bit. 

This system was by no means perfect, but it worked well for me my first year while I was still trying to figure everything out. I thought about doing the same thing this year, and even bought all of the materials until I remembered something wonderful that I saw at a professional development last year. Stay tuned for tomorrow to find out what I will be doing this coming year!