Determine your students' learning styles before assigning a project. Diane Heacox, author of "Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom," says that all children learn differently, and to incorporate differentiated instruction in your lesson plan, you will need to identify these learning styles. She cites Howard Gardner's eight learning styles: interpersonal, intrapersonal, bodily/kinesthetic, linguistic, logical/mathematical, musical, spatial and naturalist. To assess students, you can give them a questionnaire that asks them about their strengths. Students can also have more than one intelligence. They might also have one dominant and a few less dominant intelligences.
Group students according to their learning styles. Called flexible grouping, Heacox says that you should encourage students to work together. You can either group students of like intelligence, or group students with others of opposite strengths. If you pair students with those of similar intelligences, they can work together to create a project that matches their intelligence. For instance, students who are linguistic can work on an essay that discusses an area's climate. If you pair students of opposite strengths, they can divide a task into parts that will best fit their learning styles. For instance, the spatial student might draw a map, while the interpersonal student presents their project to the class.
Ask for students' input when designing your map lesson plan. You have several options for creating lesson plans that revolve around maps; however, a key component of differentiated instruction is that you ask your students what they most would like to do.
Plan map activities that work with multiple learning styles. For instance, logical and spatial students will enjoy actually drawing a map of an area they are studying, and the linguistic students can work with them to create a map legend. Intrapersonal and linguistic learners will prefer creating an essay or possibly a short story that talks about the geography or culture of the place they are studying. Naturalist students can actually go outside and draw a map of their city or neighborhood. Intrapersonal learners will enjoy sharing what they have done with the rest of the class.