Set Up a Goal Station With Me | Personalized Learning

upper elementary teachers I've got the perfect thing for you to start implementing into your independent time it is so much better than centers it will completely revolutionize how your kids engage during their independent time and it is going to be so much simpler for you so get ready because in this video I'm going to be sharing all about it so it is no secret that I have always spoken about my hate for centers my experience when I first became a kindergarten teacher was that I implemented centers we were doing the daily five and so I had all the different stations inside of my classroom I work to differentiate it I was spending my weekends in front of the TV cutting out so many different activities for my students and then I realized that they weren't even doing them correctly so I really wanted to look for a way to be able to have my students engage in with work that was more individualized personalized more goal-based versus me just putting everybody into a station that they would have to work on no matter where they were as far as their levels so I wanted to share with you my goal station so I decided to start implementing something called a goal station I knew that I wanted my students to be able to set goals because it's such an important skill for them to be able to learn from a very very young age and yes I had kindergarteners setting goals and they were practicing towards those goals so I was already incorporating elements of this goal station in kindergarten but it didn't look exactly like this so when I moved to Upper Elementary I was not about to start putting in centers because I wanted to build more Independence goal station allows you to build that Independence allows you to teach that important skill of goal setting and being able to Masters those goals and it also personalizes the instruction of your students here's what I love about it the most is that I don't have to stress about maintaining this or changing out the activities once you have it done it's done you just need to make sure that all is well like all the pieces are where there need to be and you can even find a responsible student in your classroom to help you with that but I don't have to remake activities and put new things in there it's not thematic it's not any of that it's based on instructional goals that you want your students to be able to achieve so this is my little goal station I have an Ikea Cube that I've purchased it's just four of them and then inside of it I have these bins so these are the bins that I use I love these bins um I got these from Amazon I will leave a link so that you guys can go and check it out and inside of it are various folders so right now you can see that this one has a label on it it says literature comprehension um I have one that is for grammar resources fluency resources and then also words and vocabulary and so I add on to this because in the previous years I've only had it for fifth and sixth grade so I'm trying to now build one for fourth grade all of my other fifth and sixth grade activities are put inside of my storage closet since I don't have any way of using those um so I build on to it as I go and as I teach certain lessons I will place those inside of there and now that I'm teaching informational I wanted to have you guys join me in creating one for informational comprehension so I'm going to take you through the process of how I put together my entire goal station and I'm gonna warn you it's gonna take all week because this is a little bit of a time-consuming project when you first get started but once it's done it's done which is such a happy thought so we're going to talk about goal stations we're going to be talking about some of the activities to put in there and I'm going to be sharing with you some of the ways that I Implement these inside of my own classroom so I'm excited to get these started and I will be sharing more with you as we go through the day it is officially the next day I was in a little bit of a funk yesterday and when this kid started coming in it was just there was no use in me trying to do much of anything else so I want to walk you through one of the most critical components when it comes to setting up a goal station inside of your classroom so I'm going to share my screen and we're going to look at a spreadsheet that I have created okay so one of the things that I really wanted to make sure when I was creating this goal station is that one I could keep a track of what are the activities that I'm putting inside of it because I wanted to make sure that I had a variation of activities meaning not everything was task cards because if everything's task cards it's very lower level knowledge I wanted to provide some opportunities for more projects I wanted to offer my students a little more creative things that they could be working on to really tap into the personalized component of it so I decided to create a spreadsheet and this is actually a spreadsheet that I'm going to be sharing out with you all at the end of the month if you are part of my mailing list so I recommend that you follow the link and get a part of the mailing list so that way you can get this spreadsheet as well and it's all ready for you to go and that is again going out on the last Tuesday of this month so you're going to notice that down here at the bottom I have different tabs I have the comprehension literature informational fluency grammar words vocabulary and so on so forth and these are broken into my buckets and so then I really wanted to make sure that I was hitting some of the targeted skills in strategy or skills in areas that I really want my kids to have opportunities to practice with so I created an asking and answering questions I had a text features text structures main idea key details summarizing and point of view and these things you can add in as you start to go through them but this is what I started with and I did this for each of the areas so I just basically sat down and tried to think like what are some of the focus areas and skills I want my kids to have practice with and this gives me a really good starting point you have to have a starting point you have to have a way to be able to organize that information or else it's going to feel very over whelming and this was that for me and so one of the things that I wanted to do is that as I was adding in activities I could come over here and do you know task cards I would have one for an all about me text features book and so it would offer different variations I would just put the title there and then once I have that as students are working on that and we set that as like a an area where they're going to focus and complete I could check them off and what this allows me to do is just to make sure that I'm not repeating activities with my kids so when I sit down for their goal stations and we start to look at what we want them to focus on and they're picking activities I can make sure that I'm tracking what they're doing um and they're not you know again duplicating some of those activities that they've already done at a different point in the year so this is where I am now now I need to start collecting some of the activities for the goal station so it's been a little bit since I have recorded last um our gym teacher was out sick a day and so I had to be a gym teacher for a day I've realized I never want to be a gym teacher ever again and then yesterday I just had the worst headache ever uh we've had a lot of change when it comes to the weather here um and it just has been really really funky so I have been working to get a few things done when it comes to the goal station I want to share with you where I am at at this point and then start talking to you a little bit about how I start to put it all together it is Thursday currently so as I've been working on this I've been doing a little bit every single day just to kind of give you guys a perspective of how long does it take to really put one of these together it takes a little bit of time I will tell you though I don't work on this at home so if that gives you a better idea I only do things here in school and I lost a special one day I was a gym teacher oh bless all you gym teachers out there and I didn't have a really a special yesterday because it's only 15 minutes long so I have had two days now in a row where I haven't had much time to really devote to this but I have gotten some done and I'm excited to share with you okay let's let's look at our goal station over here okay I decided to move us over here because the lighting is better than it is on that corner of my classroom which is where my goal station is located so we're over here and so I want to show you some of the things that I've been working on so one of the bigger things is that I want to utilize the school station for students to be able to demonstrate their Mastery and understanding of the concept or skill that I'm teaching so what I've been working on is creating some of these Choice Sports and you can see that this is an informational Choice board four text features and so I've tried to put different tasks that would allow students to demonstrate their understanding so I have things as basic as task cards a feature is about me which I'm going to show you in a minute text features poster that they can work on text features hunch which I do have an available boom cards because I love love love boom cards as a quick side note I am going to be doing a video coming up talking about some of the applications that I love for reading and writing because a lot of them out there are just no bueno so I wanted to share some of my favorites with you guys so be looking for that in the month of March okay back to the choice board um I have this text feature matching a flipbook and then also a presentation that the kids could work on so you can see it's like a variety of different options now this does not mean that these are the only things that I'm going to have inside of this folder I can always add more things to it but at different levels this is just for them to be able to demonstrate their understanding so inside of this my thought but is that I'm going to actually add this to the outside of the folder and then on the inside I have my different folders now these are very basic ones they're not the ones that I really want I wanted one that has like a zipper pouch that I would be able to add my cards in there unfortunately I can't find those at the Dollar Tree anymore but this one is the features about me writing so you can see it has the directions here and then they would open it up and they would already see these packets so this one is a text feature about me and they would work on a book about themselves and they would utilize different features so they would just go through the list of them and that's it they could share with the class we could post it up in the classroom library for them to be able to look at that one I'll put this back later the next one I have is a text features hunt again I place the directions on the outside so that kids can have an understanding of what to do and it just makes sure that nothing gets lost and then on the inside there's this one so they have what the text feature is it gives them the directions they would fill this out with four different features that they can identify and then I have task cards guys you can use anything you have now these are some that I've purchased from TBT myself and I really like them and so these are the ones that I'm going to utilize I keep recording sheets here for them and they can access this whenever they need it so that is what one of these folders would look like I put all of the folders in one hanging file folder system that way we can keep it pretty organized I should go through and label some of the task cards to make sure that they are a place where they're supposed to go but kids keep them pretty organized again for the most part I just have to make sure I'm putting in time to go in and double check that everything still looks good and it's in its place but you could also find students to do that so I have another one that I'm working on for text structures so you can see here's the choice board getting an idea of what I'm putting in there and then I'm utilizing some of the things that I've done in the past so a couple of these actually both of these are going to be from I believe it's teaching with a Mountain View she's amazing I love her but she did the final magazine like a magazine project so I'm gonna place that in there again I'll have copies for students and then I have some of her task cards as well so I have her task cards with the recording Pages already in there for students to be able to practice so that is a couple of things that I would place inside of that folder then what I would end up doing is inside of this bin it would be labeled with um informational like comprehension and so that way students know exactly what type of Bin it is and so all of the activities are going to help with comprehension with an informational text so what I would do is then take all the activities again I'm going to probably laminate this and then just staple it to this little outside folder but I would place these activities right inside like that okay so then students have a very clear understanding of where all of the materials are going to be located they can access the materials I don't have to do that for them they know where it's going to be and it's going to be completely organized so all of these items this one would be for text structures would be placed here and then it would have its own separate file folder so they could literally take out the entire file folder and then like flip through the different activities to be able to decide on one of them but that's how I organize it so this is the basic organization of what the activities are like again I love these bins highly highly recommend them I've had them for years and years and they still are phenomenal it is a little bit of an investment but they're definitely worth it so I'll leave a link so that you guys can go and check these out so that's it I mean you can use any folder I have hodgepodge folders if you were like you know probably Michelle where you have to have your folders all kind of be the same understandable but because I've been using these for so many years and some folders just don't last I just have a hodgepodge of folders inside of them so now that I have this part done there are a couple of other really critical components that you have to have with this to ensure that it's like a well-oiled machine that you're not putting in so much extra work that you're killing yourself so I want to share with you a few more things that you have to make sure that you have set up in order to make this goal station work because the idea of having so many kids on different levels doing different things is very overwhelming and it will feel overwhelming in the beginning and so here's my tip for you if you are wanting to get started with this I recommend getting a group of kids first that you feel as though you can trust to get started with it train them and then they can be kind of your helper whenever other kids are getting started so you would start with the group and then slowly start to have other kids get involved with this process if you just try to dive in and make everybody do it at the exact same time you're going to feel overwhelmed and you're going to quit so don't do that to yourself break it down um but let me go ahead and get these things put away and then I want to show you a few more things with this and to hopefully make it all work for you can we all just appreciate for a minute how crazy my week has felt I have stacks of papers I have folders that I need to take care of I have things over here things over there more things over there things inside of my bin um this week at school has uh been one to really challenge me I don't think I've ever been so excited that it is a Friday but I am so happy that today is Friday the sun is shining it looks like it's going to be gorgeous outside uh winter I don't think is here anymore um and it has been a very long week so I am looking forward to my two days and then a four day week next week which is going to be very nice well at least with kids I have a five day week they have a four day week so I wanted to share one more thing about setting up your goal station and something to really make sure that you are successful when setting this up because the systems the processes that you create is really going to be the the biggest factor in whether it's successful or not so I wanted to share a binder that I have started to put together um again I feel like all of this is something that takes a little bit of work um and it's mainly because I don't want to take work home so I do all of this when I'm here in school I don't bother with any of this at home I did that for many many years I'm not going to do it anymore so I um have been setting this up and it's been slow moving but it's been working out really really well for me so let me show you what's inside of it I've had this binder since I've taught kindergarten um it is well loved it looks a little dirty on camera okay so inside of the binder are a few different things um the first is going to be over here on this side and these are just going to be extra sheets so this is a goal sheet and this is a weekly goal sheet that I use to help me track my students so I will put the week and then I'll put the block and then I'll name my students and I'll name the goal that they're focusing on along with the station that they're working in sometimes it's a continuation from the previous week other times they're finished with it within a week and then I'm able to check them off but I fill out one of these at the beginning sometimes the end if I'm really really good with my time and I'm not exhausted but I'll fill these out every week so that I know what my students are working on the next part is going to be the student sheet so this is what their page looks like it's going to have what is their goal um what will how are they planning on meeting their goal the times and days that they're working on things and then they have like a short reflection here so they put this inside of their folder and they staple it to their final product and they turn this in um to me at the very end of whatever it is that they're working on this next part is going to be um where it's like an example of one of my students pages so I'm going to go ahead and flip over so that you guys can see the next part but here you're going to notice that we have literature comprehension informational comprehension we got word study we have grammar and then we have fluency there this is where I keep all of my resources and my answer keys so what I've done and let's go to the informational because that's what we've been working on I went on ahead and created and made my choice for it so these are just for my reference here these are ones that I'm still thinking about doing for the main idea Choice board which is not totally done yet but then I have answer keys for any form of like task cards that I have possibly placed inside of this station so I've done that with pretty much all of them so you can see my literature one has way more I feel like because I've purchased more task cards it seems like over the years but this is where I keep those towards the very very back and that makes it really nice for me when I'm trying to grade something because I can quickly just get to it but then towards the very back I have more pages for me to be able to make copies of I think I would like to put these inside of page protectors right now they're just clipped to the back of my binder here but I think I would end up putting these in page protectors that way I can just make quick copies of them and then put them right back so that is the um the binder that is what that looks like so I think with having this system in place having a way for me to be able to track what my students are doing but then also give them their feedback pretty quickly with all of the resources in this binder it just makes it a little bit easier for managing it and it doesn't feel overwhelming so if so set a lot of these things up in advance it's going to feel better but that's it that's my goal station guys I hope that you've enjoyed this very hodgepodge of a video it feels like because it was like little spurts that I had time over the course of this week to be able to record it um but I do have videos coming up where I'm going in depth with them a little bit more so the next week I'm going to start talking about um you know how does it end up personalizing um so if you're kind of on the fence of whether or not to consider it I'm going to talk about some reasons for why it personalizes the learning and why you should be implementing them into your classroom and then at the very end of the month I also have a video that's going out about some tips for helping you to manage it a little bit better so if you have questions on a goal station let me know down below don't forget to sign up for my email list so that you can get some of the freebies that I have for this um that's going to be going out throughout the month so be sure to check that out I am going to go ahead and start getting ready for the day I'm not going to record any more that is what I've told myself I'm gonna get it done I've got my bridging literacy t-shirt on it's my comfort colors and I love it um where are my green it's my favorite but I hope that you guys have had a wonderful week um I know I feel like February is so tiring I get exhausted during this time but let me know how you're doing let me know how everything is going let me know what you're looking forward to in the upcoming months because sometimes we need to think about what's happening later on to help us kind of look at that as like oh I can't wait for this and it just kind of is that motivational piece but anyways so thank you guys so much for watching and I will catch you all next week bye

Channel: The Lettered Classroom

Views: 3,948

Keywords: teacher tips, The Lettered Classroom, classroom decor, first year teacher, classroom setup, classroom organization, a day in the life of a teacher, elementary teacher, middle school teacher, education, how to be a teacher, how to teach, new teacher, teacher youtuber, teacher vlog, weekly teacher vlog, classroom ideas, elementary teacher, classroom inspirations, teacher organization, upper elementary teacher, teacher life

Id: AI0Q29tEmt4

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023