5. Meeting individual needs with young learners

On the previous post I talked about differentiation instruction. Now I'm going to expose my reflection about the article by Peter Westwood and Wendy Arnold, Meeting individual needs with young learners.

As good teachers we want to be, we have to consider that we are dealing with children, so we should take into account their general features. We know that every child is different than the others, therefore we have to meet our students properly like: their interest, needs, skills, prior knowledge, strengths, weaknesses, preferences, abilities and goals. 

An interesting approach to achieve this objective could be differentiation instruction. However, there is a big discussion around that issue. There are people who agree and people who disagree.

From my point of view, I agree with differentiation instruction. I think that it can be useful and worthwhile if you use it in a proper way. Furthermore, we can use different strategies that will help us to adapt to our student’s individualities.

This is a list with some useful methods that we can start using if we want to meet children's individualities:

-Differentiated resources material

- Whole group activities/small group activities

- Projects

- Student and teacher interaction

- Computer support learning

- Multiple intelligences 

- Learning styles and preferences

There are some things that teachers are doing nowadays.

I think that all these things are really important. Although I think it is quite primordial work different learning styles. 

I think that a pretty good way to put in practice different learning styles is working by corners.  It gives to teacher the opportunity to work with multiples intelligence, because teacher can plan different activities like linguistic, mathematical, kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, musical, and visual. So that gives you the possibility to reach to teach all students.