Caution: Unit Plan Under Construction

This week is the unit plan week. Starting lessons, editing, and figuring out what exactly needs to go into each lesson will be the main goals of the week. 

This weekend, my group and I decided to start working on our unit plan. We met up and worked for three hours! We accomplished a decent amount of work, finalizing our first lesson and even starting on our second.

We decided that our first lesson should be a direct instruction type of lesson. This type of instruction is used to get content and information across. We decided that the first lesson we teach should be used to introduce the students to key vocabulary and important concepts. These concepts will be revisited during our future lessons as a review. 

For out second lesson, we are planning on using our previously created artifact bags for an inquiry lesson. Students will have to explore artifacts and a book to find out about colonial life. Students will be working individually at first, filling out a worksheet about their specific artifacts. Once completed, students will work together to find connections between their artifacts. 

For our last lesson, we are thinking of doing a divergent type of question to lead into an activity.  A divergent question is one that has many answers and is more open-ended. We are thinking of having students take on the persona of a colonial child and write a diary entry from that perspective. Students would then share their writing in an "author's chair" type of activity. At the beginning of this lesson as a review, we want to have the students participate in the making of a class Venn diagram that will compare/contrast colonial life to today. This will give students ideas to write about in their diary entry and will be another way to review the material. 

In class this week, our main focus was going over the unit plan format. Through a direct instruction format, we worked through a PowerPoint that broke down each lesson that we need to have for class. Some vocabulary words that came up during the presentation were:

Significance - content taught is important to the discipline and to the student's need for powerful social studies

Coherence - the questioning and investigative nature of social studies cuts across all parts of the nit and across the cuticulum

Convergence - factual questions, converges to one single answer. 5 W's, lecture or text. Direct instruction. Knowledge based questions.

Divergence - open-ended questions, what if?

It's really important to incorporate a variety of both convergent and divergent questions while teaching. There are specific times where one type would work better than another type, though. For example, a convergent question would work better in relation to direct instruction. It checks for understanding of a topic and makes sure that students are comprehending what you are teaching. 

In class we also participated in a jigsaw activity with our peers. In a jigsaw, you become an "expert" on your assigned topic. Once you learn about your topic, you become the teacher and teach the topic to your group members. I think that this activity would work really well during a cooperative learning lesson. Though part of the lesson would be individual work, students then work together to put the pieces together. It allows students to share new information with peers and takes the primary focus away from the teacher. 

My group received feedback from our first lesson as well this week. It was a decent first attempt at a lesson plan. Though we need to switch some things around, I think we will be prepared for fieldwork. I really enjoy the group I'm with. There are a lot of hardworking people who really know how to crank things out in a timely manner. 

I think that with all the new information that we have learned about unit planning this week, we will be able to create a stronger unit.