- Hey y'all, it's Ayo with tips and tricks on surviving and thriving in SPED, and we're gonna start with differentiation. (light, upbeat music) I remember my first year in the classroom. It was sink or swim like every day. Uhhhh, well it was sink or swim like every minute.
And it was hard because I was putting together so many lessons for students, trying to meet all of their needs and killing myself in the process. So today, I'm gonna show you how to take one activity and differentiate it in a bunch of different ways so that you can meet the needs of students who have more basic skills, all the way through to students who have more advanced skills. All right, so we have an activity that looks like this, and I can tell you from experience that most teachers would say, "You cannot teach students of a variety of different levels "with a activity like this "to meet their needs in a realistic way."
and I used to believe the same thing. But now that I've been doing this for a while, I can tell you, it can be done. So we've got an activity here that's just students shopping for a snack with whole dollar amounts for math. Now, for some of our students, this alone would meet their needs, but what if we were talking about students who were a little more basic in their skillsets?
Maybe they're still working on one-to-one correspondence or number identification. I would take this same activity and introduce numbers, and ask the student to choose which one matches the number in the chip activity. So here it's $3. I would present these three options and see which one the student could pick.
I could eliminate some of these as well so that a student only had two options, and by giving them only two options, make the choices a little more simplistic. And, I could take it down to just one option. Here we're just looking for students to work on response mode and realize that these two things are the same. So there's a couple of different options when you're working with students with more basic skills to be able to use an activity like this for functional and academic needs.
You might also have a student who's working at the middle of the road. Those students would take this same activity and may actually count out the bills to match it so that they can count money with one-to-one correspondence and understand the relationship. You might decide that you wanna throw a monkey wrench in this and remove some of the bill options so that the student has to use coins in order to come up with the total. But this same activity could meet those needs.
Now, if you are working on some more developed skills, you might decide that you're gonna give the students larger bill amounts and ask them to calculate the change. So we can work with this same activity to do addition and subtraction. But what about those advanced kiddos? That gets a little more complicated, right?
We wanna make sure that we meet their needs, and something like this would quite frankly be too basic. So here, we're gonna ask our students to do something a little bit more complex. Now I am just grabbing a Post It and a marker, and I'm gonna ask the student to take 10% off because the store is having a sale. I love sales.
So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna ask our student to do some multiplication and percentages to figure out what the new total is. So just adding something like this to the activity makes it more complex. If you want to be a little bit more functional, you can also add sales tax, and ask the student to calculate what the sales tax would be for this purchase. Now we're talking about doing some more advanced math.
In fact, you can layer both of these together to make it even more complex. Now, you can do this with just Post Its, and that's gonna meet the needs that you are trying to do here. But if you wanted to come up with a template so that a student had a visual to work from, you could still go through this same process and do that. So there you've got it.
You've got a way to take this basic activity and meet the needs of a little bit more basic student who's doing the one-to-one correspondence and number recognition, middle of the road students, we're gonna use money and coins in order to calculate things, and higher-level students, we're gonna calculate percentages off and tax. One activity meeting the levels of a multi-leveled classroom. That's what we're looking for. All right y'all, this is Ayo reminding you to stay strong and teach on.
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