Differentiated Instruction for Elementary Students

          Evaluating and Choosing Instructional Strategies      My experiences in a second-grade math class led me to design a differentiated lesson for a crucial mathematical concept. In second grade, students experience place value and flexible thinking about numbers to apply to computation strategies, such as addition and subtraction. Observational data, learning style inventories, and discussion with the classroom teacher all led to the decision to create a lesson that builds number sense conceptual understanding in computation strategies. Specifically, I focused on a concept that reviews and applies the decomposition of two-digit numbers to support addition strategies. Place value understanding is an important precursor for computation and conceptual understanding of arithmetic skills, and emphasizing place value helps students with multi-digit addition tasks (Lambert & Moeller, 2019). Students need strong number sense related to pla...

           As educators, we constantly gather and analyze data to guide our instruction. I recently gave a learning style inventory to four second-grade students to identify their individual learning style preference for math. The graph below shows the results from this math-specific learning style inventory. Interconnection of Learning Styles and Domains of Development All domains of child development, including cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical activity, support student learning. When these domains of development are integrated with different learning styles and approaches to learning, students are able to demonstrate improved learning and cognitive growth (NAEYC, n.d.). Educators can support individual student learning needs by providing learning experiences that meet their learning styles and developmental skills. As students develop and strengthen their social, emotional, and linguistic skills, they are able to participate in socia...

 Current Technologies that Support Differentiated Instruction      Technology should make learning more equitable, efficient, effective, and engaging and can be used to differentiate learning to meet students’ individual needs (Kilbane & Milman, 2023). The following technologies provide opportunities for differentiated learning that engage students and provide enriched learning experiences. Flip: ( https://info.flip.com/en-us.html )      Flip, previously Flipgrid, is an online application that allows students to collaborate and communicate assignments through video.  This technology can be incorporated into any group or individual assignment or as a means of expression for assessments. Flip is free for all users and is user friendly as it is easy for teachers to set up a classroom and create assignments to share with students. Students are able to simply press a record button to record their response. Flip is not limited to one content ar...