Differentiated Instruction Conference Days 4 & 5

So last night I never got to write my post about Day 4 at the conference, which is why I am doing Day 4 and 5 today.

They had this posted at the conference and I loved the saying on it. 

Day 4 (Thursday) at the conference was really good. I ended up switching some of my sessions around and went to some sessions about teaching writing, developing creative book report assignments for students, and vocabulary games. All of the stuff that I learned about was great and can be applied across the curriculum to any content area. I plan on doing some blog posts in the future specifically for some of these things and I want to work on creating some items for my TpT store with them. The one thing I would HIGHLY recommend would be to look up Jane Feber. She was the presenter for two of the sessions I attended and her books and ideas are OMG AWESOME. I plan on ordering all three of her books in the near future. 

Today was Day 5 and the final day of the conference. My first session today was on using puzzles in science, social studies, and ELA as a way to engage students. The information and ideas I got were wonderful and will definitely help teach students curriculum content in interesting ways that will help reach all students, especially students who are kinesthetic or artistic learners. Some of the ideas included Parts of Speech Sudoku, Assignment Clocks & Dance Cards, and Wuzzles. I'm planning on going more indepth on these ideas in future posts. I also attended another writing session today that covered ways to assist the struggling writers in your classroom. The session specifically targeted ways to help students develop their understanding of the Six Traits and all the steps of writing from prewriting to publishing. I ended the day with another Rick Wormeli session on how to effectively motivate students. It was really informative and made me think about the way I present material and the ways I assess students. The biggest takeaway from the session was that it is absolutely essential to get your students to relate/connect in some way to the material - make it relevant to them and their lives. Once you do that, they feel invested and want to be successful and want to learn. 

All in all, the SDE Differentiated Instruction conference was an amazing experience. There is so much information offered at the conference and the professional connections you'll make are great. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend you to take the opportunity and attend one of SDE's conferences. I know I'm definitely planning to attend next year (they're gonna be back in Vegas for another conference July 7-11 of 2014)