Using Color Coding for Differentiation

Our special education classes tend to have such a HUGE variety of learning levels and needs.  It can drive a teacher to insanity trying to come up with separate lessons for each child that is differentiated to their specific learning style.  Here is a quick way I found to take one task and make it accessible to more of my students.

We did a lot of cut and paste activities in my class.  Most of my students had difficulty writing, so I needed a way to produce a product for parents to see as well as a concrete way to gather data and perform assessments.  Pictured above is such an activity.  The students were sorting pictures with words into different word families.  This was perfect for my 3rd-5th grade learners, but not so much for my K-2 students.  So, I would outline the various pictures/words with a certain color that matched the color of the construction paper for that particular word family.  That way, it turned into more of a color matching task (with a high degree of distraction) which even my younger students could do.  For even more support, I would color in the entire square rather than just outline it.  In the end, I had one sorting activity that almost all my students could do with very little prep time on my part.

Consider trying this technique to easily make more rigorous tasks engaging and more independent for your lower level learners while still utilized grade level content.