1 Running head:DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE INSTRUCTION

Developmentally Appropriate Instruction

Renae Alston
Regent University

In partial fulfillment of UED 495 Field Experience ePortfolio, Spring 2015

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What does Developmentally Appropriate Mean?

One of the most important yet difficult aspects of teaching is what is acceptable to teach
students and what is not. What is too much for my students? When do they need more? What
concepts will they be able to grasp? What is beyond their thinking? All of these questions can be
summed up into one phrase: developmentally appropriate. What is developmentally appropriate
both relates to content and practices. A simple definition of developmentally appropriate practice
and contents would be a setting and curriculum that meets the cognitive, emotional, and physical
needs of children based on child development theories and observations of children's individual
strengths and weaknesses (Beitz 2012). Developmentally appropriate practice requires that
teachers make decisions daily based on their knowledge of child development, taking into
consideration individual learning differences and social and cultural influences (Bietz 2012). The
question is: Are these students mentally able to understand, engage, appreciate, and elaborate on
this concept?
Chick it Out
How things are made and come to be on this Earth is a concept that many teachers
struggle with because they are afraid of the questions that may arise from the subject. Where do
babies come from is probably the most frightening question for a parent and even more
terrifying for a teacher. My class has been working on life cycles by hatching chicks. It touches
on how a chicken goes from an egg to a chicken. Chick hatching spans three weeks and allows
for a number of opportunities to solidify other concepts. This lesson is very age appropriate
because it allows the students to make connections using their prior knowledge of what a chicken
is and what it can do. It also allows the students to expand on their knowledge and ask questions
such as, what is the difference between the eggs that turn into chicks and the eggs that we eat.

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Hatching chicks is something that the students like to do so it is easy to use chick hatching as a
premise for other content areas. I chose these artifacts because the students were able to write
about what was going on with the chicks during shared writing. They were able to use math
concepts to count how many days it takes for the eggs to hatch as well as count backwards as a
countdown to hatching. Students were able to make predictions about what was going to happen
next in the development of the eggs and through technology they were able to see what was
going on inside the egg. We were able to parlay the egg hatching into concepts of what is alive
and what is not alive as well as the needs of living things. Students were able to use sequencing
skills by ordering pictures of the sequence of an egg hatching. Furthermore, they were able to
display responsible behavior, a citizenship skill, by learning how to care for the eggs as well as
the chicks when they hatched. This lesson also catered to different learning styles as there were
different activities related to egg hatching. There were visual representations of the eggs they
could actual manipulate the eggs, for those students who are nature learners; having that
connection to the farm was a bonus for them. We read nonfiction and fiction stories about egg
hatching which was great for auditory learners. It was all around a suitable lesson for all learners
of kindergarten age.
Conclusion/Final Thoughts

What I found out is that while developmentally appropriate instruction is a key aspect in
reaching your students and them being able to understand, engage, appreciate, and elaborate; it
goes beyond that. The very simple answer I discovered was excitement. If the students are
excited about something, be it chick hatching or any other activity, they are more likely to be

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able to understand, engage, appreciate and elaborate. Furthermore, it is not just their excitement
as students, it is also your excitement as a teacher.

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References
Bietz, Kara (2012). What is developmentally appropriate practice? Retrieved March 2015
from http://www.brighthubeducation.com/