Supporting Students With Learning Differences In K-6 Classrooms

Have you noticed that even though you have been assigned a Grade 2 classroom for the year, you are actually teaching a K-3 split classroom?

Additionally, you are probably doing this with 25 or more students in one room with no educational assistant support.

Compounding this situation is a new curriculum that fails to consider the two-year student loss of learning and skill development of thousands of elementary students.

To top it off, there are few aligned resources on the market to provide for these new student learning outcomes with little to no division-based funding to purchase and/or create new classroom resources.

This is when you arrive at the stark reality of teachers being forced to find and/or create their own resources using their own personal finances.

Of course, this problem doesn’t just exist in Grade 2 classrooms; academic learning differences are the norm in K-6 classrooms. There are many social, emotional, and physiological differences between students in any given classroom.

It is not uncommon for a teacher to have 10 or more students on an IPP (Individual Program Plan) that outlines specific learning and behaviour goals for each of these students.

With little to no educational assistant support in the classroom, this means the other 15+ students, who range academically from low to high functioning, receive little if any classroom attention from the teacher.

So what is the solution?

Research supports iterative learning practices in the classroom.

Iterative learning is trying an activity, evaluating the process, improving the process, and completing the activity again with greater success.

Iterative learning stems from a growth mindset. With this kind of learning, students become more accepting of knowing that they may not get it right the first time.

This learning practice helps students isolate ideas, organize them into mental models, and apply them again in the future by building on what they learned.

How can this be applied in today’s complex and overcrowded classrooms? 

My teaching method includes contextual repetition, elaborative and blended learning variations, and consistent and gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills. These methods are the foundation of everything within our K-6 Learning Library.

Some refer to this as project-based learning, however, I refer to it as a schematic model of teaching and learning that focuses on differentiated instruction for students with various social-emotional, literacy, and numeracy learning needs.

At Education Rocks, you will find over 50,000 student learning activities, organized as lesson plans and unit plans, based on the schematic model. 

With this model of teaching, learners have the opportunity to formulate their own learning requirements and eventually become self-directed and engaged learners who can solve problems.

All of our resources include engaging instructional videos, audio functions, and high-definition images. These resources can be used both digitally and non-digitally at home or at school. 

Thank you for reading this blog post on supporting students with learning differences in K-6 classrooms.

The lesson plans in our K-6 Learning Library will help you and your child or students right now and for years to come. The best part is you can edit these resources so that your child or students can focus on what they can do right now and build on it rather than internalize that they are not performing at grade level.