Differentiation, in my opinion, is the hardest part of our job as teachers. Especially in the early grades, we have students that come to us with a wide spectrum of abilities. The inclination is often to spend most of our day catering to the needs of our low kids. They need extra guidance with the assignment. We are told to pull them every day for small groups, the advanced kids once a week. The whole class is coloring the sight word "the" because half the class did not pass the high frequency word test. I believe this not only does a disservice to those advanced kiddos, but over years of this they actually lose that advanced status. They don't make the progress they could be making and get frustrated.
So what can we do. Here are my suggestions:
1) Everyone does not have to work on the same class assignment. If we are reviewing plurals and are ready to move to guided practice. My low kids are working on a hands-on activity to add "s" to words and make plurals. My middle kids are deciding "s" or "es" applying the rules we have learned. My high kids are deciding apostrophe "s" for possessive or just "s" for plurals. All students are engaged and I can sit with my low kids and help them as needed.
2) Homework should be differentiated. I will never forget a friend of mine complaining because her daughter's teacher sent home a letter A to color-this girl could not only identify all the letters she was reading on a 3rd grade level in Kindergarten. She literally asked her mom "why do I need to do this, I already know this?" I think about that a lot. Sounds complicated but I assign my students Group 1, Group 2, Group 3-I tell them it's based on the skills they need to work on. Group 1's homework is sounds, Group 2 sight words, Group 3-reading comprehension-just as an example.
3) Challenging them does not mean more work! I was in a class once where the teacher said Johnny always finishes in 10 seconds so I give him these packets to complete. *sigh* These students can be working on:
* independent study projects based on their interests
* writing comic books
* writing digital stories
* making a game for workstations
* coding activities
* creating a game for the class on sites like Blooket or Pear Deck
4) Still pull your high groups. All students can improve their reading skills and deserve an opportunity to work with the teacher to do that.
5) Differentiate spelling lists. I personally don't really even believe in traditional spelling tests but we have to do them. So my groups each have different lists. If they can get 100% on the pre-test on Monday, then that grade stands and they challenge themself with harder words. I give them a picture dictionary and they pick out words they want to learn (last year I had a student that wanted to do all the different kinds of dinosaurs). Or I give them words based on the same spelling pattern. Group 1 will have pout, Group 2: couch Group 3 will have: glorious. That way everyone is still learning things they have not yet mastered.
6) I have extolled the virtues of Pear Deck before. What I love about it is that I can record on the Google slides and then students can answer the questions. So I can make one with sight word practice and one with activities for fact and opinion, or vocabulary. Students can work on these and be learning on their own level.
7) Having students who are finished go read a book or my biggest pet peeve-go help others who need help is not helping them master a new skill. People always say "well, helping someone else learn makes you learn it more". No, it doesn't. If they can already read the sight words, helping another student learn sight words is not helping them. They need to be working on fluency, comprehension, vocabulary skills. Tutoring the other kids is my job.
It takes a bit of planning and a bit of organization but once you get into the habit, it's easy to make sure everyone is learning something new every day.
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