Hello again friends!
This year, I am piloting personalized learning in my new school! I have been very excited about learning ways to help my students work on becoming more independent and taking charge of their own learning.
The journey to embracing personaliz
ed learning has been full of twists and turns, but I honestly think that the boys in my room are enjoying this style of teaching so very, very much.
The basic idea behind personalized learning is to give students more choice and voice in how they learn. One of the ways that I’m going to be doing that is with opportunities to engage with technology. Another way that I’ve been implementing that is with leveled choice boards. Once the student has
completed their tasks, they can come to me and I will check it and let them know if they are free to move on to the next task. Each time they move through a level, I give them another sticker on our standards mastery chart.
They really get into knowing where they are in the process of their learning and I am finding–especially with boys that the competition of being first at just about EV.ER.Y.THING. is a huge plus in delivering their instruction in this style.
Usually, the first thing I do is give
the kids a pretest. They usually hate this step. All of them hate to score low, but it makes them eager to know what they need to do to show me they can take it again and show mastery. After we do the pretest, I level them. You determine how many correct answers equal the level they are on. The first time I gave the assessment, the highest scoring student had six answers correct, so he started at LEVEL 1. The rest of the boys at LEVEL o. 
The next step was to deconstruct the standard. (Click on the picture if you’d like to have that for your learners.) After we do that, I explain the activities that they will be able to do for the unit. Each boy gets their own leveled choice board. We use a rubric for everything, so, my choice boards always have the standard and rubric on them. They always have something they need to do on the computer FIRST. For this set of activities, I put the assignments on my You Tube Channel. 
You can access the Continents & Oceans Playlist videos for this unit by clicking HERE. My favorite video for this was the continents & oceans song which is the Level 2 activity. It only took my kids a week to know all of the continents and oceans. Two of my boys were able to test early and participate in the Level 4 task which is to create a powerpoint that showcases the seven continents. They had a week to prepare. All in all this was a super successful unit with my kidlets! If you are teaching the continents, please don’t hesitate to use the free songs and videos on my You Tube channel as enhancements for what you’re doing! 🙂 Thanks for reading! 🙂
I put all the resources I explained here in a pack in my Blog Shop. If you’d like to purchase it, please click HERE.
Gosh, this is sooooo good! I am a subscriber but for some reason I just received this post and another post in my mail today. I have so many questions for you:: Are the kids on personalized learning tracks for all subject areas or just science and social studies? Did you do this with your first graders last year? How long are your units? You have a consultant come and guide you with this but do you plan your units on your own? I think that’s it for now! I’m sorry to ask so much but I tried to look personalized learning up online and I couldn’t find anything. I love what you are doing and want to start it, like now, in my classroom! Thank you, Andi
Andi!
You made me smile! 🙂
Currently, I am teaching third grade, but yes, last year, I did this in math and writing with first grade. This year, I’m doing it with math, science, and social studies. The unit that you are referencing took me about a week. Some of the units in math and science are up to two weeks long. My third grade pacing guide is in another post on long range plans for third. The consultant from the county comes in to teach me tech correlations. So, this year, I learned about Plickers and Kahoot! 🙂 Then I implement those in the classroom and he comes back to see how its going, or co teach with me using the tools. My CRT plans with me once a week. She approves the units that I’m building and the assessments that I’m writing. She jumps in when I need her to on the planning end, but mostly the plans are all mine. I have a pin board on personalized learning and a blog post that introduces it too. Hopefully, I got to all your questions? I can honestly tell you that my kids really love the increased opportunities to have a voice in the way that they learn. I can’t tell you how many times this week I had to bring out my teacher voice…to get kids to STOP WORKING on projects so that I could teach another subject!!! 🙂 It’s the BEST! 🙂 I will be sharing more about my journey with the boys in upcoming posts. Trust me! 😉 xoxo