Blog #6 - Differentiating Instruction

 As in any classroom, we have a diverse group of students with many different individual needs.  The two biggest that stand out to me are our multiple ESL students, and our group of special needs learners.  This makes for an interesting day, where no single lesson plan is going to support or help our general ed students, or ESL students, and our students with special needs.  Instead I am pretty sure that my cooperating teacher makes no less than four separate learning plans for each day.  Before I discuss these differences though, I do love that she always starts the day with commonality (which in usually music based).  I think this is so important to find teaching moments that appeal to ALL the students so that "groups" are not formed and that they continue to feel like a classroom community.

We are lucky in our class that we have three aides as well as the teacher.  I know that this is not normal and most classes are lucky to have one aide, but three are definitely needed to make the class run smoothly.  Because of this boon we spend a lot of our day in small group learning.  The groups are always broken up by where the individual students are on their learning journey.  I have spent one math break out doing nothing but counting colored blocks to help our special needs learners understand basic concepts, and the next day I'll have a white board in hand and be working through adding fractions with our more advanced mathmeticians.  These different learning plans help our students feel successful and not bored.  We also do a lot of one on one with our ESL students.  Just a few weeks ago I wrote about how we were learning phrases to help them, but that changed this week after SEP when parents requested that only English be spoken to their students.  So now we are working on simple phrases in English that help us communicate.  One of the fun ways we do this do is by knowing that these particularly students LOVE Mario and anything associated with him.  So we will work Mario into our phrases as a connection.  The biggest one being, "work first, Mario second." We say this multiple times a day, but they understand, and it gets the job done!