Top tips: Differentiation for children with SEND
Providing equality of opportunity for all children, may incorporate differentiating aspects of your curriculum or provision to provide meaningful learning opportunities for children with SEND. Review our top tips on differentiation against your own daily practice.
Top tips for differentiation for children with SEND
- Use ongoing observation and assessment to ascertain individual children’s current stage of development, identify their strengths and what they can do, in order to plan meaningful experiences
- Liaise closely with parents and external professionals to provide a consistent approach to supporting development
- Review your physical spaces to ensure they are accessible, that you offer calm, quiet spaces, that offer opportunities for children’s independent play, and reflect the child’s interests and voice
- Review the lighting, such as considering whether you have natural light, or soft dimmer lights to create calm spaces.
- Also review how is sound felt across your play spaces, such as identifying if you have background music on all the time, or whether you provide quiet spaces to support children to focus
- Resources should meet the development stages of the children using them and offer open-ended play experiences, challenge, cooperation, negotiation and collaboration, discovery, problem-solving, new experiences, fun and opportunities to follow their own interests and passions
- Be responsive to children’s communication. If a planned activity fails to meet their needs, follow the child’s lead and interests to adapt what you are doing, e.g. using materials in a different way, modelling an example, using visual clues, adding key vocabulary or scaffolding learning.
- Don’t be afraid to abandon any original plans in order to follow a child’s interest. For example, if a child is interested in the texture of a ball, you may change the planned throwing activity to one where they are introduced to a range of different textured balls for exploration.
NDNA products to support you with this activity
Disclaimer: Activities with children must always be risk assessed, including for allergies or choking. Children must always have adequate supervision. Resources and materials must always be appropriate for children’s age and stage of development.
