Differentiated Instruction

My classroom has a majority of academically gifted students in it and they are usually pulled out to go down to the AIG room and the remaining students work with the teacher in the classroom for the block. I had to go to the EC specialist at a school I volunteered at recently to find different resources because I don’t see any differentiation in my actual classroom. One great website that she suggested was the CAST book builder site that we used in our science methods class. She had compiled a folder with tons of books that she had been showed and created herself about many different topics and in every different grade level. These books are amazing – they help those that are reading below grade level by reading the book out loud to the students all while forcing the students that are on grade level to think more about the material with the questions that the animated characters pop up and ask and then those that are above grade level have challenging questions that they are asked to think about.

One book that she showed me in particular was great. When we created our books, we were told that we need three different characters that help students read the material, ask questions about the text, and that provides other science facts. For this book, there were three different characters as well, however, each character went along with a different reading group. The students sat in their reading groups while the book was being read and Pedro (the penguin) went along with the lower level reading groups, Monty went along with at level readers, and then Hali went with the above grade level readers. At the end of each page, each character would ask a question about that page in particular and each group would answer their characters question as a group and then share their answers with the class. This way the students do not know that they are answering questions at a different level – they just think that there are three different questions about the text and each group is answering one. The specialist suggested that in order for the groups to really think that they are just answering questions, you could have levels and the characters rotate so that the lower levels are not always answering questions from Pedro and so on.