In this blog post, we’ll explore 3 easy ways to differentiate instruction to help your English learners succeed. When working with small groups of multilingual learners, often not all students are at the same level of language proficiency.
To ensure that every student benefits from the learning experience, it’s essential to think about how to meet their needs with the right scaffolds. At the same time, we want to do it in a way that is simple to implement. Let’s look at 3 ideas.
One of the easy ways to differentiate instruction? Differentiate vocabulary materials!
When it comes to teaching English learners, using games can be a fun and effective way to teach vocabulary and engage students. Differentiating vocabulary games and activities ensures that they remain challenging yet achievable, keeping students motivated and focused.
One easy way to differentiate instruction is to have matching games with interchangeable parts. Start with basic tasks and gradually increase the complexity as students become more comfortable with the content. For example, begin with simple matching activities of pictures and words, before moving on to more advanced matching with definitions.
Another one of the easy ways to differentiate instruction? Differentiate reading materials.
There are several reading companies that have resources available at different levels. Reading A-Z, Readworks, Newsela, and epic! are just a few. Your school and local libraries may have books on an informational topic at different reading levels as well. Some of these resources also have a read aloud function or resources in other languages so be sure to check them out!
For many of these resources, it is just a matter of matching them to the reading abilities of your students and printing them out, or assigning them virtually. For some like the one pictured above from Reading A-Z, one book is available at three levels of complexity. Readworks also has materials at different grade levels, as does epic! Be sure to save your favorites to use year after year.
One more way to differentiate instruction? Differentiate writing scaffolds.
A third simple way to differentiate instruction is to use questions and sentence frames to provide additional scaffolding. For example, when writing paragraphs, students might have questions to answer for each part of the paragraph. Alternatively, these questions could also have a sentence frame to support multilingual learners in need of more assistance.
Think of what information you want students to know and share in their writing. Come up with three questions and matching sentence stems. Students that don’t need them, should be encouraged to use more advanced sentence structures and vocabulary. Again there are no elaborate materials needed to differentiate.
In fact, if you are looking for easy ways to differentiate instruction using the resources above, you can find them in this TPT resource. Included in the bundle are vocabulary photos, words and definitions as well as writing supports worksheets all done for you to help your students write about different types of extreme weather. Just click on the photo below.
If you are working with multilingual learners, you might also like the following blog posts that provide inspiration and teaching ideas for your ESL classroom.
And stay tuned for a future blog post on additional ways to differentiate instruction for ELLs when we focus even more on writing! We’ll be talking about 5 ways to differentiate writing for English learners.
Finally, if you aren’t following me yet over in instagram, you can find me @the_esl_teacher. I share weekly ideas for supporting your multilingual learners with tips, resources, and photos from my classroom. Please come over and say hi!
Happy teaching,
Beth
