We went the differentiation route, and as we predicted, it was a dog's breakfast. It's simply not reasonable to expect a teacher with 20-30 other children to develop and deliver a whole other curriculum for the one outlier student. Even the teacher who went into that with good intentions found it difficult to maintain with any sort of consistency.
Even worse, our DD is a social butterfly, and differentiation often meant she was shunted off to the side while the rest of the class did a group activity well below her level. This caused her to choose between two of her fundamental needs: does she join in with other children, or does she learn something? Or to look at it the other way (because she's very much a glass-half-empty sort of person), does she choose boredom, or isolation?
