Designing a Differentiated Lesson Plan

     This one day lesson plan is based on the preflight class that I have every day for 45 minutes.  I have 5 first grade students in this group that are in need of remediation on alphabet skills, letter sounds, initial and ending sounds, and developing rhyming words based on simple rules of phonic skills.  These five students are from three different first grade classrooms, and I have been assigned to teach this remediation program to them.

Differentiation

Planning for this group takes some time to prepare lessons and look at data consistently to know the direction that lessons need to go.  My mentor teacher, Kristin Vernon, almost always states, “Repetition is key for these students.  They must practice the same strategies over and over again.  The more repetition we give them, the more it will be retained.” These students love coming in every day, building their alphabet, and reporting their letters to me in sequence.  It is a fact that these first graders are completely engaged when they are thinking and moving letters around on their tables and then building words with them afterwards.  It is almost a competition on who can build their alphabet first, or who can raise their hand with the correct letters in sequence when forming a word.  

When choosing lessons, we look for activities that keep their hands moving and their minds constantly challenged.  These are lower level students, so telling them that a task is a challenge also increases their engagement level. My mentor teacher and I would look at where we are in the program and choose our lessons that increase the knowledge for these students.  We make sure that all learning styles are incorporated within those lessons. Weselby (2022) states, “...differentiated instruction as factoring students’ individual learning styles and levels of readiness first before designing a lesson plan” and this is what we do daily.  Since there are five students in this group, we really do not group them into smaller groups but she mentioned that we can always try.  We chose activities that reflect the need to continue to build words and reiterate rhyming word concepts using kinesthetic, visual, and auditory skills.  Since these are foundational first grade skills, it is important that they consistently practice these.  

Differentiation for kinesthetic learners helps students constantly move, build, and engage with other students.  We make sure to incorporate activities that allow students to talk, critically think, move their bodies and their hands.  Visual learners need all the visual cues, like posters, words on the screen or in books, and paper resources.  Auditory learners are the listeners and they need to hear the words pronounced correctly, practice orally, and hear rules stated clearly.  Since all of these students are low level students, I would use as many picture models and concrete models as necessary.  If I had ELL students in this group (I do not), I would practice a lot of sequencing alphabet skills.  I would ask what letter comes before _, after __, or in between  __ and __.  If gifted students were in this group, I would use some harder words for them to rhyme and name the rule.  When we finish a lesson early, I choose a game to play that still incorporates what they have learned.  Students see it as a game, which is great!  “I spy something that starts with __” is definitely an attention getter.  Then, I allow students to try the same on their classmates while they guess what the object is.  Another time filler is using technology.

Technology

There are several things that I have tried with this small group of students.  One activity

is playing I spy.  I will state, “I spy something that starts with the letter s” and students will quietly walk around the classroom and take a picture of what they think the mystery object is.  Then, we share.  Another simple activity is doing the same thing, but with rhyming words.  I say, “I spy something that rhymes with pot” and students might snap a picture of a dot or the hot water handle.  I have also used Seesaw or Google Classroom to place activities for them to go in and complete as a quick formative assessment or exit ticket.  Since this class is short and the program is built for interaction and manipulating letters, the technology piece is a fine line.  Lynch describes, “The focus, some claim, is often too much on the technology and not enough on writing and communication skills” of students leaving at the college level.  Technology needs to be appropriate and use time correctly in the classroom.  The first grade teachers do progress monitor these students and that is done in mclass using Amplify. Amplify states that they are, “...an adaptive assessment and instructional solution that makes research-based personalized learning a reality for today’s busy classrooms”.  This allows teachers to get results quickly and be able to interpret the data that mclass provides. 

Resources

Amplify. (2023). Assessment & intervention. Amplify Education, Inc.

https://amplify.com/assessment-intervention/

Lynch, M. (2019, August 9). 5 skills that students are losing because of tech. The Tech Edvocate.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/5-skills-that-students-are-losing-because-of-tech/

Weselby, C. (2022). What is differentiated instruction? Examples of how to differentiate

instruction in the classroom. Resilient Educator.

https://resilienteducator.com/classroom-resources/examples-of-differentiated-instruction/