Differentiation in the Classroom

            I have learned a lot about differentiation while taking this class. Through discussions in class and watching videos on what differentiation means, I am thoroughly educated on what differentiation does for a child. Differentiated instruction involves providing several options for students to demonstrate what they are learning. It’s about working together to work out problems. This all begins with good teaching.

            When you have a diverse classroom, it is sometimes very hard to meet the needs of everyone. By having differentiated instruction, this helps out the students in a lot of ways. It organizes students into groups to talk about different parts of a topic based on their needs. There are designed stations for students to go to with different tasks to perform with different equipment. By using differentiated instruction it benefits not only the child but the teacher and school too. It benefits the child by helping them work on what they need to work on themselves as an individual, it helps the teacher because they can make sure each of their students is getting the education they need and it helps the school because when every individual student is getting the help they need, parents will be saying good things and their classrooms will all be doing well.

            There are many different examples of differentiation that can be used in the classroom. One example of a good way to use differentiated instruction in a classroom, lets say third grade reading, would be flexible grouping. This strategy is when students are part of many different groups based on the match of the task to student readiness, interest, or learning profile. There can be skills-based or interest-based groups. There can also be group assignments that are purposeful and sometimes they are random. As said in the Youtube video called Differentiated Instruction in the Classroom, you can have students share their reading response logs with partners or take turns summarizing what you read together.  By using flexible grouping it allows for both collaborative and independent work. That way while reading they can read to themselves but if they have a problem they can ask their partner if they know a word. It also keeps students from being labeled as advanced or struggling because while reading in flexible grouping, you are able to help each other out. Also, in the video, they talk about different types of leveled reading like small group reading, peer tutoring and partner work.

Finally, giving the children a chance to work with a large variety of peers is very useful in any classroom because it gives you different opportunities to work with different people when in the long run that’s what life is going to be.

            

Montlieu Project

            I had a very educational experience working at Montlieu this semester. I got to work with the iPad’s in a way I never worked with them before. I also got to work with two new apps that I hadn’t worked with before and they were very interesting to me and I found that when I teach I will definitely want to use those in my lessons.

            The girl I worked with during this time was named Jerney. She was a very sweet girl but also very shy. When I would ask her what her goals were, she would just keep shrugging her shoulders. Then when I asked her questions about what her goals were she would keep shaking her head. So I just decided to stay in the general area of goals like stay healthy, make good grades etc. She also didn’t seem very into doing the slideshow until the end when we could animate the pictures and words to go in and out with every slide presented.  Then we worked on another project that talked about our favorite hobbies and subjects in school. She actually enjoyed doing this more then what we were doing before with our goals. Overall, there were some positives and negatives with us using Keynote.

            Comic Life was a very cool app to use. When I first started using the app with Jerney I had realized she didn’t know how to spell most words. Every time she would make a new slide about something she would ask me how to spell a word. I think taking pictures for this project was a very smart move because it’s a very cool thing when children get to see themselves in a presentation. I think that’s what kept Jerney so interested in Comic Life. She would always ask me when we were going to take more pictures for the slideshow we would be making. She also loved the fact that in the app you could make your own shapes if you wanted to. One time I went to Montlieu and that’s all she wanted to do. I taught her how to make a star and she was really excited by it. I think aside from learning how to make shapes, this was an educational experience for the child because since she was so excited about taking pictures, it got her excited about writing too so she was really focused on writing the captains underneath the picture. I realized when we took pictures she also didn’t ask me to spell out as many words for her.

            When it was time for us to do our own activities with the children, I decided to download a free app called SightWords. It’s an app that it designed to teach the child to recognize common words by sight and sound. Since there would be a lot of people around in the library, I decided to only focus on her recognizing words by sight. There were different grade levels but I focused on hers, which was 2^nd grade. At first, we just started with the words but I realized she was really good at recognizing what the words were. She would only have difficulty with every other 7 or 8 words. So then I decided to have her read three words then make a sentence out of the three words. Then we would take a picture corresponding to that sentence we made. This was really fun to her. She had a great time and loved making up sentences and finding things to take pictures of. It was great because the last sentence we did was something about friends and we took a picture together and she really hugged me tight. It really showed me how just by spending this much time with a child you truly can create a friendship and she was able to break out of her shell and not be as shy.

            I think the experience had its ups and downs. I think that being able to work with the child on your own was difficult at first because there’s so many things you can do but once you find something they like its awesome because they get to have fun and learn at the same time. I also thought that Comic Life and Keynote were fun to work with but I feel like they were similar apps and similar projects to work out within the app.  If I could improve the experience in any way, I would let the children decide what to do with what apps but at the same time to make sure it was educational and not just letting them play games. I liked getting to know each other through the presentations through Comic Life but at the same time, that’s not always entertaining to the child.