Differentiation

Crucial!!

I am always thinking of how I am going to reach each individual learner in my classroom. No lesson is ever perfect. That is why it's important to be a reflective teacher. Know your students. Constantly be assessing where they are at and what they are taking away from each lesson. With that being said, there is always a way to reach students even better than before! How to do this? Being critical about exactly how you can differentiate each lesson based on the needs of each individual student. Every students has preferences and modes of learning that is most beneficial to them. The art to teaching is figuring that out and implementing it in the classroom.

With that being said I have been thinking about how I can reach out to my Spanish speaking students. I want the lesson to be relatable and fun for them as well. I have to be creative as to how I can integrate Spanish into their lessons and even combine it with other modalities such as the arts.


Using music and singing to encourage the use of spanish in the classroom is a fun way to involve students in the language (http://singnspeak.com/). Not only does it incorporate music into the classroom but it also allows for differentiation and offers an alternative way to help kids remember some of the language. 

A poetry unit could use some exploration of poems in Spanish! With my first graders we were beginning a unit on poetry. To implement the immersion of poetry in our reading workshop I decided to do centers. One of our centers was filled with poetry books and poetry handouts revolving around the Spanish theme. Some poems were about the Spanish culture, some were in Spanish, and some had the English translation along with it. My kids had a blast reading these poems with one another!