We've (also) failed to find anything that really works for differentiation in science in the early years. In our case, I'm fully confident that it wasn't for lack of the teacher trying, not least because the year we tried hardest, DS was being taught science by the same teacher who was teaching him maths. She totally got DS and his maths differentiation worked beautifully. I think science is just much harder to differentiate; in DS's case, the things that were useful to him were just too mixed up with the things that weren't to allow them to be separated out for differentiation.
ETA not arguing, of course, that there can't be schools and teachers that don't try hard enough; just that it's a harder task than differentiating maths. DS still doesn't often learn new facts in science lessons, but he does learn skills that he will need and won't learn from books, DVDs etc. It's enough, just.
Last edited by ColinsMum; 05/14/13 12:40 PM.
