Evaluate a lesson where you clearly differentiated and explain the strategies and resources you used.

The best lesson for me to evaluate my use of differentiation is the year 5 set 4 class that I have been taking. This class has a very low writing/reading age and has a very low predicted grade for their SATs. All of this makes the learning that they require rather specialised.

The pupils need a fast paced lesson to keep them interested, much like we require a fast paced film to keep us interested and to stop us drifting off or falling asleep. Similarly, to stop the pupils from drifting off/falling asleep in lessons due to being unable to access the materials I have had to learn to differentiate. The starter began with a recap of prior knowledge, as their retention of knowledge can be quite poor. This was done by recalling the uses for a comma and a connective in sentences, then writing them on whiteboards. This allowed me to assess their knowledge and get them thinking about the task in hand- working with commas to a greater extent. The main was split into three fifteen minute sections (lessons last for one hour) which meant the tasks set the pace. I began by reading Matilda to the pupils, which helps with their reading skills. This was then supplemented by a photocopy of the book from the beginning of a chapter where the pupils had to highlight the commas and connectives with highlighters and pens. This photocopy was done on buff paper to aid the pupils who have dyslexia and dyslexic tendencies. After this I handed out the worksheets for them to work on (again on buff paper to aid dyslexia friendly strategies). This lesson was differentiated because I used five work sheets of progressing difficulty, and this worked well in the class due to some pupils working at a greater rate than others, therefore having more work to do of a greater difficulty was useful to keep all pupils working at all times. The main strategy here was to push pupils to work at their optimum speed whilst progressively stretching them, which fulfils the stretch and challenge whilst using differentiation to target all pupils. After the lesson I received informal feedback from my tutor who said that I should try to differentiate on an even smaller scale, and target specific pupils to push harder, not just allow all pupils to progress with a number of sheets.