Our group had a blast presenting the prezi assignment on differentiated instruction. Kelley and Katy had great input on how to work it out in front of the class and made it so easy to prepare. Those girls are awesome! The funny thing about our presentation was that the examples that we used were done in about ten minutes. Teachers are faced with time consuming planning every day, week, month, and year. Differentiated instruction does not necessarily mean that you have to spend excessive amounts of time incorporating it into your lesson plan.
One of my favorite hands on instructions is when I taught first graders how to subtract. Some of the kids were familiar with subtraction, others were not. Some of the kids can process written problems with ease, some can not. I thought of a fun game that would aid the students with difficulty to play that would engage them in subtraction. I brought in ten water bottles and a soccer ball to play subtraction bowling. All of our problems started with ten, and when they bowled the soccer ball to the bottles, some of the bottles fell. They could see that three fell down, so 10-3=7. I jumbled the bottles around after a while and started with seven bottles. You see what's going on? They were able to manipulate objects and then write the numbers down in a number problem on paper.
It's not hard to think of different ways to incorporate differentiated instruction in all disciplines, or all grades. I also taught sixth grade during student teaching and we were preparing for the TCAP in geometry. We were studying the Pythagrian theory and some of the kids weren't understanding how side A plus side B equals C. Before I became a teacher, I worked as a supervisor for telephone construction. Every day I worked around telephone and power poles. Poles that are not in a straight line have to have anchors and guy wires to support the weight of telephone and power cables. These guy wires form a triangle that represents the theory perfectly. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this is probably what a lot of kids have trouble with as well trying to process written words with real life similarities. Anyway, we walked outside to the closest telephone pole and a few of the kids had lightbulbs flashing above their heads when they understood what the whole theory meant. It was a needed visual for those kids.
That's awesome, Billy. It's always good to start with a conceptual idea; something concrete that the students can see, touch, move, etc. Like you said in your post about the bowling pins; something they can manipulate and conceptualize. Then, after this is established, we can move into a procedural understanding of the lesson being taught. That's when we bust out the textbook and let the students show us what they know. A lot of teachers do not want to do this "hands on" stuff because it can mean a great deal of work. Mind you, I do not do this for every lesson myself, but I do incorporate manipulatives when teaching brand new concepts.
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