Varying Instruction

Different Learning Styles

My cooperating teachers have made concerted efforts to cater to different learning styles during lessons. For example, in English the students first read the short story silently to themselves. They then listen to the audio form a CD that the teacher plays while underlining any words that they don’t understand. We then review the words they had trouble on and they copy them into their notebooks with the definitions. The next day the students take turns reading the story aloud. They do the following reading comprehension activities in class and for homework, so that in total the students should have reviewed the material 4 or 5 times by the end of the unit orally, through listening, and through written activities.

Miss Anne also constructed some fun hands-on projects for the class’s final review before their test. Using mirrors and toilet paper rolls the students created a type of kaleidoscope and talked about how their eyes worked to see the image. To review the respiratory system Miss Anne constructed a model using a soda bottle, straws and two balloons. For the circulatory system the students were given sponges cut into the shape of valentine hearts a bucket of water that had been dyed red. At each of the stations we asked the groups to tell us what system they thought this station represented, what were the parts of that system, how did it work, etc.? The students all loved getting to move around and play with the different systems.

Miss Monica, my other cooperating teacher has been working on integrating their new projector into her lessons. So far she has used it to project videos, power points, and to show a verb webpage that the class completed together to practice irregular past tense verbs. The students get really excited whenever she uses it. I’ve used it once to teach a lesson about North America for the class’s continents project.

It’s important to vary lesson structure, not only to appeal to different learning styles of the students, but break up the monotony of long blocks and keep students excited about learning and lessons.