Differentiated Instruction in the Preschool Classroom

This week I have read an article called “Meeting individual needs with young learners”, which explores the characteristics of a differentiated instruction teaching model. This methodology consists in teaching students bearing in mind the individual differences among them. Each student has his own level of ability, his strengths, his weaknesses and his preferences and interests, so everyone in the class should be treated differently. 

The authors of the article suggest some methods and strategies to approach to this teaching model. I have classified some of them thinking about the different components involved in the teaching process which I consider very important in a differenciated instruction model:

1# One strategy related to the content that we want to teach, is to include varied tasks of different difficulty levels and provide meaningful work for students who finish assignments or class work earlier or faster than others. Also, it may be interesting to provide multiple ways and materials to work the same subject.

2# Another example related to the learning process that I find interesting is that students work in groups. In this type of activities, students work together and support each other in working toward a common goal, so students can contribute to the best of their individual characteristics and strengths and they can learn from each other. 

- One strategy is to group the students according to interests. Having all the students who like animals reading a story about animals and all the students who like monsters reading a story about monsters will promote interest and productivity. 

- Another strategy is to group the students according to abilities. One great way to do this is to put a student who is just learning English in the same group as someone who has an advanced level. The advanced students can help the lower level students while the lower level students are helping to reinforce the concepts to the advanced ones.

3# Related to the products of the teaching process, teachers can use different ways to assess the students comprehension. If you have told a story and you want to know if a student have understand it, you can ask him to tell you about what happened in the story. But if your student likes to draw, maybe you can ask him to draw you a picture of the story you just read.

4# One last factor to keep in mind is the learning environment. Early education classrooms are designed to provide children with a variety of experiences throughout the day. Some students learn better by moving around and interacting. Other students are more shy and prefer to work alone. Make sure there are spaces in your classroom that are designated for quiet activities as well as interactive ones. Your learning environment should make all students feel safe and positive to get the most out of them.

With this article I have learned that to be effective with differentiation, teachers must find a way to meet the needs of all the students in their classroom. So we have to talk with the students, asking them their opinions and seeing how things are going and finding out what they are interested in. Teachers still need to recognize that children learn differently. We have to create multiple paths so that students with different abilities and interests can develop themselves.

Classroom Daily Routines

One of the responsibilities of a teacher is to provide a structured environment in which students could build confidence in themselves. That means getting, setting and keeping a routine. Especially on how the class starts and ends. In this way, students will know exactly what to expect as soon as they enter the classroom and they will feel more safe and secure. Also, routines make it easier for youngest students to learn and achieve more, because they are repeating the same thing day by day.

Routines can include usual classroom habitudes (how will the children enter the room, where will they place their backpacks...), but as English teachers we can create our own classroom routines.

For example, I suggest you to start each English lesson singing a couple of songs.

Good morning song

It may be interesting to start the English lesson every day with a welcome song. You can invent one, but there is an interesting example:

"Are you happy?"

To continue with class routine, you can ask some question like "Are you happy?" and children must answer correctly. And then you can sing a song related to the question. In this case, we can sing "If you're happy and you know it". But we can introduce anything that we want to work with them as a routine and find or create a song related to the subject.

This is a way to get the students attention while they are learning vocabulary. I think it is  an interesting routine for every day lessons.

Teaching English to Preschool Children

I'm working in a school where I am learning how to teach English to youngest children. There I'm learning some important tips to keep in mind:

Learn survival and functional words

We have to avoid abstract concepts and concentrate on concrete real items that the children can understand. We can start with familiar topics such as colors, numbers, animals, body parts, the weather, days of the week and short everyday sentences and phrases. However, there are more important things to learn too. They must know how to ask for food or a bathroom, because this is vocabulary related to their urgent needs. 

Hello	Goodbye	Inside
Outside	Yes	No
Bathroom	Eat	Drink
Stop	Come here	Look

Also, they must know and understand functional words and phrases that we will say them day by day (Are you ready?, Stand up, Sit down, Stop, Try again...).We don’t have to teach them by formal instruction. Children learn very easily, so we can just speak slowly all the time in English. This way and by repetition, they will become familiar with all this vocabulary. Using it in real situations will allow that these expressions and vocabulary become meaningful for them.

Teach informally

Preschoolers are not able to sit for long periods of time and listen to us. We have to take advantage of indirect teachable moments. For example, while walking around the school, we can use usual expressions and vocabulary that may be useful in that moment. We can say them "silence, there's people working" or "stand in line".

Sing and dance

The rhythms, repetition, and movements of music will help us and the children build vocabulary in English. These are great for movement and frequent repetition of vocabulary and phrases. This way, they will be singing a song in English at the same time that they will be learning vocabulary by repetition. There are a lot of funny and useful songs to teach English to children. One day I will post some songs here in my blog :)

Playing and learning

Children love games and stories so you can capture their attention while building their vocabulary and language. For kids of this age, we can use board-type games or interactive games with miming, movement, dressing up or guessing games.

Story-telling

It may seem difficult to teach English by story-telling, because children of this age don’t understand Enlglish yet. But this is a false idea, because they can learn a lot of vocabulary and expressions through the stories. Stories are a faboulous resource for preschoolers, who will want to hear the same tales told over and over again. We just have to use a lot of pictures, because they are key to understanding. We have to use as much vocal and facial expression as possible, and acting out the story with gestures. We can use colourful illustrations to help them understand, and act parts of the stories afterwards with role playing games.

It is fine if the children use their own language to reply or ask, but we must pre-taught them the key vocabulary and try that they use them as time goes by.

I hope that it will be useful to you !

Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0

We can take advantage that we are living in a digital world to use Web 2.0 tools to teach our students. It is a creative resource, easy to learn and very catchy for the children, that give us diverse and rich solutions to motivate them.


On the one hand, we can use Web 2.0 apps to educate students to use these digital tools for their own learning. Everyday students are using social medias like Facebook, Twitter or Blogger in their life outside of school. The goal is that they use all these applications in an academic manner, establishing relationships with other students, and creating knowledge through those connections.

On the other hand, we can use them as teaching resources during our lessons. We can do creative presentations with online applications like Slideshare or Prezi. But we can also teach a lot of new tools that can be useful to learn English. There are a lot of applications that we can use. For example, I have recently learned about an online app. called Storybird, which allows us to sign up using a teacher account. This tool allows us to write a story using beautiful images from different illustrators. It's very simple. Someone starts a Storybird by writing a few words or grabbing a few images; then another student add more words and pictures, and then another one. This way, all students can write a collaborative classroom book by making their own contribution. And they can do it sitting side-by-side or from their own house, as housework. This way we will be catching the students attention at the same time that they will be learning to write in English correctly.

However, we have to pay attention in the way we use these applications. We must be sure that we are familiar with the applications that we are going to show to our students before we can use them in class. The more prepared we are, the better. Once we know the application very well, we can show it to the class. But before they start to use it, they must think about what they are going to do with this tool (with Storybird they have to think first about the story they want to write). So they have to prepare the activity before they can use it.

And of course, as teachers, we can use Web 2.0 to teach ourselves, by sharing, researching and finding new ideas and resources from other teachers and colleagues.