Chapter 8, page 1
Chapter 8: A Kindergarten Differentiation Plan
Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11 will provide an illustration of the concepts that we have introduced in the context of kindergarten, first-grade, second-grade, and third-grade small-group differentiated instruction. We have constructed each example with a specific set of children, assessments, and curriculum resources in mind. Remember that our goal in this text is to support your thinking as your build your own differentiation plan; no one of these examples is likely to transfer directly to your classroom. The concepts, though, do travel!
Mrs. Coffey is an experienced kindergarten teacher, but she is using a new set of instructional materials for the first time. As she plans for differentiation, she carefully reviews the organization of her instructional materials and she reflects on student achievement data, both formal and informal. She has two hours to teach her literacy block, and those hours are protected from interruption. Her goal for differentiation is to plan for one hour of whole-group instruction, mostly geared toward developing comprehension and vocabulary, and then to plan for one hour of differentiated instruction, with three needs-based groups rotating as follows:
- instruction with her
- one required follow-up activity
- one choice center.
During the literacy block, Mrs. Coffey has created a listening comprehension center, where children listen to books on audio tape and then draw a picture of their favorite part of the story. She also has a word-work center, where children can choose among a variety of alphabet activities and games. Finally, she has a writing-for-sounds center, where children choose pictures from a large basket, then use dry erase boards either to label the pictures or to write simple sentences about the pictures. Nine children (three in each center) can work comfortably in centers; Mrs. Coffey’s 19 children, then, can be divided again and again into three or four groups, and those groups can range in size, depending on the most current student achievement data.
Step One: Gather Resources
Mrs. Coffey first gathers and organizes her resources. Her centers are not new; she has a large collection of children’s literature with audio versions for her comprehension center, and each year she adds new titles and rotates older titles from the school’s library collection. Since she has a new core basal reading program, she has many new activities to place in her word-work center. She doesn’t know exactly how to sequence those activities, though, so she turns her attention to the scope and sequence of her new program.
Curriculum Resources
The basal core program has many charts and guides, but Mrs. Coffey wants to really know the program’s skeleton – its organizational structure. She quickly realizes that the activities are varied, and that there are many choices that she must make as she plans for instruction. Figure 8.1 is a sample of the chart that she makes for herself so that she can keep track of children’s achievement in the program; it represents the most important content from one of the basal’s themes. In terms of phonics, she makes special note of the fact that the program combines attention to phonemic awareness and phonics, introduces consonants in small sets in the initial position in many words, and also introduces short vowels both in the initial position and in short-vowel, one-syllable word families. For comprehension, she sees that the program has several useful story maps that she can move into her listening center. The high-frequency words that are introduced have a strong overlap with the ones that she taught last year, but they are in a different order. She knows that it will be better to redo her word wall from scratch rather than to add the new words to her existing list; she will add words to the wall as she teaches them.
Figure 8.1
Kindergarten basal scope-and-sequence summary from one theme in a basal program
Decoding/Spelling/Alphabet / High Frequency Words / Comprehension Skills/StrategiesCc
Short i
Dd
Ll
Short o
Kk / get
where
it
the
can
is
my
do
up
red
one
what
here
three
little
two / Predicting
Using illustrations
Story elements—plot, setting, and theme
Character
Recall and retell
Compare and contrast
Summarizing
Sequence
Assessment Resources
Mrs. Coffey’s district procedures include a norm-referenced screening test for vocabulary; all of her students, as part of kindergarten registration, will take the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 3rd edition (PPVT-III). PPVT-III results will be used as outcome measures for language development and to select children for a language development intervention group that is designed by the speech-language pathologist at the school. The goal of that program is to accelerate oral language development for the neediest children at the onset of kindergarten; given the strength of these oral vocabulary data, Mrs. Coffey does not need to conduct additional assessments of vocabulary to guide her in making a differentiation plan; she also knows from experience that the PPVT-III scores reliably identify children whose comprehension is weak.
Next Mrs. Coffey looks for useful assessments that come with her core, especially in the areas of phonemic awareness and phonics. Here she is disappointed; she expects to find a phonemic awareness screening test and various measures of alphabet knowledge. Since these are not included in the program materials, she gathers assessments that will help provide screening data, be useful for grouping students, and provide direction to her differentiated, needs-based instruction time. She chooses among assessments presented in McKenna and Stahl (2003) Assessment for reading instruction. Figure 8.2 presents her choices and her plans for using the assessments. She decides to use the same measures for screening, diagnosis, and progress monitoring because the tools she has chosen are so flexible.
Figure 8.2. Assessment plan for Mrs. Coffey’s kindergarten
Tool / PurposeLetter-name inventory / Screening, diagnosis, progress monitoring
Letter-sound inventory / Screening, diagnosis, progress monitory
Phonemic segmentation test / Screening, diagnosis, progress monitoring
Developmental spelling test / Screening, diagnosis, progress monitoring
Finally, she makes two additional assessments. The first is a sight-word inventory matched to the scope and sequence of sight words in her core program. She will administer this progress monitoring tool to all of her children at the end of each theme so that she can reteach words that children have trouble with. The first portion of this inventory appears in Figure 8.3. You will note that it presents only those words that will be introduced in the theme (see Figure 8.1). These words are shown in isolation and the child is asked to pronounce each one. Mrs. Coffey uses an identical copy to note which words the child cannot identify at sight. She uses a note cards to reveal one word at a time and is mindful of how long it takes to respond. A sight word can be pronounced in no more than a second. She marks each word with a √ if it is known by sight, with a D if it is decoded accurately after more than about a second, or with a DK if the child does not know the word.
Figure 8.3 Sight word inventory for one kindergarten theme.
getcanuphere
whereisredthree
itmyonelittle
thedowhattwo
Next, she makes a letter-name and letter-sound inventory, again matched to the scope and sequence of alphabet instruction in her core. The letter-name inventory simply presents all of the letters that will be introduced in a given theme (in this case, c, d, l, and k). The letters are displayed in isolation and in random order. She includes both upper and lower cases, except for c and k, which have nearly identical upper- and lower-case forms. The beginning of her inventory – the portion corresponding to the first theme of the basal – appears in Figure 8.4. One copy is shown to the child while Mrs. Coffey uses a second copy to record letters that the child cannot yet recognize. The letter-sound inventory, presented in Figure 8.5, simply lists the letters that will be presented in the theme as part of phonics study. This time the directions to the child are not to say the letter name but the sound the letter makes. Since both inventories require spoken responses, both must be given individually, but they are typically quick to administer and yield results that immediately help with instructional planning. Mrs. Coffey makes a new inventory for each theme, and then strings them together, adminstering only the part corresponding to each theme. She will administer these inventories again at the end of each theme so that she can reflect on the effectiveness of her instruction and adapt it to the growing skills of her children.
Figure 8.4. Letter-name inventory for one kindergarten theme.
LcDkdl
Figure 8.5. Letter-sound inventory for one kindergarten theme.
oclidk
(Ask the child for both hard and soft c: “Can you think of another sound this letter makes?”)
Step Two: Consider your children’s needs
Mrs. Coffey’s experience tells her that she will have a very wide range of achievement in her classroom at the start of the year. A few of her kindergarteners will already be reading and writing conventionally, but a few will have almost no alphabet knowledge. She wants to begin to teach her children to work in small groups and in her centers beginning in the second week of school, so her plan is to make her first set of groups based solely on the results of her letter-name and letter-sound inventories. She will give the letter-name inventory to all of the students, and then she will give the letter-sound inventory to students who know at least half of the letter names. She knows that these groupings will be imperfect, but she also knows that they will allow her to begin differentiated instruction very quickly.
Instructional Groups Based on the Data
Mrs. Coffey will use a simple chart to summarize the letter-name and letter-sound data for her class. She anticipates one group with virtually no letter-name knowledge; she anticipates one group with strong knowledge of both letter names and letter sounds. She anticipates that most of her children will fall somewhere in between – they may know many letter names, and a few letter sounds, but the ones that they need to learn will not be consistent. She also knows that she will be able to teach many of the letter-names and sounds in the course of her whole-group instruction and many of her children will learn their alphabet easily once regular instruction begins.
As the year progresses, Mrs. Coffey’s instructional groups and her instructional focus will shift and become more precise. After the first four weeks of instruction, she will use the next segment of her screening tools – the letter-name, letter-sound, and high-frequency word inventories she has made to match her instruction. After 12 weeks of instruction, she will administer the spelling inventory, again providing feedback for her groupings and focus for her differentiation.
Areas to Target for Each Group
Mrs. Coffey relies on her knowledge of kindergarten reading development to anticipate that she will spend at least the first half of the year focusing on differentiating for phonemic awareness and word recognition for all three of her instructional groups. Her goal is that all of her students will leave kindergarten with a firm grasp of the alphabetic principle and its application in decoding and spelling unknown words. Because of this, all of her students will read and spell words every day in their small-group instruction.
Differentiation Strategies in Those Areas
Mrs. Coffey will use simple and repetitive instructional strategies to provide differentiation for her kindergartners; what will change over time and between groups is the content that she is teaching. In the area of phonemic awareness, she will begin the year with two strategies: initial sound sorting and say-it-and-move-it. See Chapter 3 for a review of these strategies. In the area of word recognition, she will teach letter names and sounds, sounding and blending, and high-frequency words. You will recall that they are described in Chapter 4.
Mrs. Coffey is not providing a balanced diet during her differentiated time; nevertheless, she is providing a balanced diet if you look across the whole-group and small-group instruction in which all children engage each day. Figure 8.6 presents the strategies and focus for her whole-group instruction, and Figure 8.7 is a conceptual plan for her differentiated instruction for each of three potential groups. You will notice that group 1, the group with the weakest letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, will engage in a larger variety of activities. In fact, they might also spend a slightly longer period of time in this portion of their instructional day. To make her management plan consistent even though her small-group time might be slightly varied for each group, she uses a chime to signal transitions between activities. Her students learn that when they hear the chime, they have three minutes to put away materials from their current activity and to move to their next one.
Figure 8.6
A big-picture plan for first whole-group instruction
Goal / Materials / Daily ActivitiesDevelopment of alphabetic principle
Development of phonemic awareness
Development of alphabet knowledge
Development of oral vocabulary / Core program alphabet manipulatives
Core program big books
Trade books / Alphabet and rhyming songs
Explicit letter-name and letter-sound instruction
High-frequency word instruction
Shared reading
Choral fingerpoint reading
Interactive read-alouds with modeling
Explicit vocabulary instruction
Interactive writing
Figure 8.7
A big-picture plan for kindergarten small-group differentiated instruction.
Group 1 / Group 2 / Group 3Phonemic awareness and phonics
Alphabet tracking
Initial sound sorting
Letter names and sounds
Sounding and blending / Phonemic awareness and phonics
Say-it-and-move-it
Sounding and blending
High-frequency words / Phonics and word recognition
Sounding and blending
High-frequency words
Independent extension / Independent extension / Independent extension
Children will work on a specific alphabet activity each day. / Children will write for sounds from a specific prompt each day. / Children will write for sounds from a specific prompt each day.
Small-group center / Small-group center / Small-group center
Children will choose among three small-group centers each day (writing for sounds, word work, listening comprehension), but they must work in each center at least once a week. / Children will choose among three small-group centers each day (writing for sounds, word work, listening comprehension), but they must work in each center at least once a week. / Children will choose among three small-group centers each day (writing for sounds, word work, listening comprehension), but they must work in each center at least once a week.
Plan for Three Weeks of Instruction
Mrs. Coffey knows that the only way to make good use of her instructional time is to have her materials organized and stored for easy access. At her small-group table, she has a set of dry erase boards, markers, and felt erasers, a large pocket chart for modeling, an easel, and sets of teacher and student manipulatives: letters, picture cards, word cards, say-it-and-move-it boards, and bingo chips. Each place at the table has an individual alphabet strip fastened to the table with clear tape. On the Friday before a new three-week series of differentiated instruction, she organizes all of her materials so that she can model and students can engage in guided practice during differentiated time. For initial sound sorting, she organizes her picture cards to review the sounds that she has taught in whole-group instruction and to preview the current sounds. For letter names and sounds, she organizes her own large letter cards for modeling and then she makes sets of individual ones for each child. Again, these are chosen to review previously-taught letters and sounds and to preview upcoming ones so that her struggling readers will be more likely to be able to learn them during whole-group instruction. Sounding and blending instruction also constitutes review of sounds and patterns that have been taught previously, and she is careful to use the scope and sequence from the core to guide her thinking, but also to remember that some children will need many more examples. She prepares lists of words in advance that have the phonic elements that she is targeting. As she prepares those materials, she considers the needs of group 1. As these children master individual skills, she will increase her pace and present more challenging work.