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Developmentally-Appropriate Instruction
Elizabeth Churchill
Regent University
level of instruction or work in the classroom to grow the students’ learning. While in the
classroom, it is important to know where your students are coming from and what they will be
doing in the next grade level so that you can prepare them for higher-level learning. It is also
important to know that when planning instruction for students that the instruction is simple
enough that they can do on their own, but challenging enough so that it stretches the students’
students, I will show one of the books I used to introduce safety to my preschoolers and I will
show a lesson that used a story to focus on story elements for my third-graders.
When teaching students, it is important to note that when teachers are making
“instruction appropriate to children’s age and developmental level, [to] individualize it to them,
and [that] it fits their social and cultural learning background,” (Bergin, 2015, p. 119). For
example, I have been teaching preschool lately and these children come from a poorer
background than the third-graders I taught before. I have had to readjust my thinking to think
about what these students might or might not know at this age that they are at. For example, I
figured that the preschoolers would know how to write the number five, but still some of them do
not know because they have not been getting at home and they do not have the attention span to
sit still and practice their writing. At this age it is more important that they learn play respectfully
with each other and to be introduced to major concepts rather than learning equations or some
In this preschool class, most students do not recognize all the letters or cannot count to
ten because their parents do not know how to help them learn their letters or numbers, whereas,
when I was teaching my third-graders, parents were very active and wanted to know where their
Running head: DEVELOPMENTALLY-APPROPRIATE INSTRUCTION 3
children were academically. When I have been student teaching, I try to look at the standards that
my grade level is at and then look at the standards that they will be going into so that my students
are prepared for the next grade level. One book that I have read to my preschoolers is, Always Be
Safe, by Kathy Schulz. This helps teach the students to be safe in different types of
environments, like the playground or school. By using this book, I am reading a predictable book
that helps the students to understand the concept of being safe, (Tompkins, 2016, p. 61). This
introductory concept of being safe needs to be taught to preschoolers because it will help them
learn to be safe and it especially needs to be taught to this group of preschoolers because they
may not be getting this kind of knowledge at home. This type of instruction helps them to be
ready for the following school year because they will be able to explore it more in depth and will
Now in third-grade, my students should have known what constitutes as being safe,
therefore, they do not need to be taught the rudimentary concepts of being safe. Instead we
focused more academic concepts like how to identify the parts of a story. In my lesson, “Brave
Charlotte,” I read the story of Brave Charlotte by Anu Stohner and used it to help students
identify the elements in a story and how to summarize a text. By teaching my third graders about
story elements I am helping them to learn that “the structure of stories is quite complex…to
produce a story,” (Tompkins, 2016, p. 221). This idea is still somewhat complex to a third-
grader, however they are able to handle that type of knowledge because they have been studying
story elements since first grade. Therefore, this type of instruction is appropriate for them to be
able to do on their own because it has been built upon since they were younger.
Another time that I had to adjust my instruction for the individual learner was when I was
level with pictures of children with different emotional expressions. I had my students look at the
picture to see what ideas or inference they could make from that child’s expression, (Serravallo,
2015, p. 38). Once my students were able to do this activity efficiently, then I brought them up a
level and guided them until they were able to master it. When I instructed my students this way,
my third-graders were better able to understand how to inference from a piece of text.
make the instruction for them individually and have had to make the instruction rigorous enough
so that the students can work at learning how to do the things being taught by themselves. This
type of instruction has been appropriate for their cognitive ability, behavioral ability and cultural
ability at their age level. When writing appropriate instruction, it is important to look at these
types of things so that when teaching them it will be easier to know what the students already
References
Bergin, C. C., & Bergin, D. A. (2015). Child and Adolescent Development: In Your Classroom
Tompkins, G. E. (2016). Language Arts: Patterns of Practice (Ninth ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.