Chandler School

when you're staring out at 20 or 30 students as individual as snowflakes, you may find yourself asking that ever-daunting question: "How?"

"Create file folders filled with various graphic organizers, visual aides, and sentence starters for different types of thinking (cause and effect, chronological, compare and contrast, to name a few). You can quickly pull out one of these in a pinch."

each procedure needs to be practiced 28 times to stick.

Equal education is not all students getting the same, but all students getting what they need

We have to start where each child is in his learning process in order to authentically meet his academic needs and help him grow. With a classroom full of children at different stages of learning, this certainly sounds overwhelming,

the first step is to find out as much as you can about her educational history and anything else

Use pretests.  Break the pretest up into subcategories that align with what you’ll be teaching in this unit.  Any student who gets 90% or higher in a subcategory does not need to complete the regular assignments on that topic and instead goes right to challenge work when you are focusing on that material.

Many online games are easy to differentiate, as they offer a variety of levels of gameplay.  You can assign the proper level to your students or once again allow the students to find their level of best fit.

If you need more problems for your top students, check out the fun  competitions at www.onlinemathleague.com, work on differentiated basic fact practice at www.themathfacts.com, or allow students to work on specific levels on www.ixl.com. Whatever you do, do something to ensure that all of your students are working on something they don’t already have mastered.