KAITLIN BARNES
UNIT PLANNING
My unit plans for both reading and social studies serve as vision documents, where I am able to record the guiding questions that I will use to focus my instruction. These guiding questions ensure that I am explaining why these skills and topics are important to my students, which helps make the learning more relevant to them. Guiding questions also help my students apply their knowledge in both content areas and make connections between the skills and concepts we are learning in each class. This cross-disciplinary approach helps enhance their learning because it gives them additional practice with the skills outside of the prescribed reading or social studies class time.
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My unit plans for reading are anchored around our class novels. These novels serve as the mentor texts that my students read together and use to practice the reading skills we are learning, before applying those skills to their independent reading books. I use my unit plans to plan out in-depth what TEKS I will be teaching with each novel and how students will demonstrate their learning. I also use unit plans to record our guiding questions and what pictures, videos, or activities I will use to "hook" students into the books. For example, when we were learning about character traits, one of our guiding questions was "How can we figure out character traits and feelings?" This helped students stay focused on the different ways to make inferences about characters and find specific text evidence to support their claims.
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My unit plans are more in-depth than my yearly plans, but they still do not have as much detail as my weekly plans. I use my unit plans as a way to record my vision for the unit. This makes it easier to plan on a weekly basis because unit plans help me make sure that I am incorporating mini-lessons and activities that are anchored around our guiding questions for that week. Seeing the learning experiences that I have planned for a unit also helps me ensure that I am providing multiple ways and formats for my students to demonstrate their knowledge of reading skills. Planning out the authentic work that students will produce for each week of a novel unit ensures that I am including a variety of assessment methods and opportunities for practice.
My unit plans are set up in a similar format to my yearly plans but include more detail and fill in gaps .
As mentioned above, I use my unit plans as a way to prepare the activities and questions that will "hook" my students into our class novels. For our second class novel, A Long Walk to Water, students completed a gallery walk in which they traveled around the room and answered four different anticipation statements that were related to our novel. The statements were: (1) Food is more important than water; (2) Being young is a good thing; (3) My life would be better if I didn't have to go to school; and (4) If I were separated from my family, I would be able to survive on my own. Each of these statements was connected to our novel in some way, and the gallery walk helped get the students thinking about some of the important dilemmas faced by our characters. This learning experience made the novel relevant to students before we even began reading, which was crucial because the novel took place in a setting (Sudan) that was very different from what students are used to.
Students rotated around the room at their own pace and responded to each prompt. Because I teach three classes, they were able to see responses from a large number of their peers.
By responding to the prompts in the anticipation gallery walk, students were able to form their own opinions about and connections to the main issues faced by the characters even before beginning the novel. This activity also gave us a common point to refer back to as our original opinions started to change based on what happened to the characters.
Another activity that I incorporated into my unit plans for reading that was new this school year was a writing prompt that helped the students start the school year on a positive note. Students chose their favorite part of themselves and wrote a short piece about why that part was so important. Students could interpret this however they wished: some students were very literal and wrote about how their feet helped them play soccer, while other students thought deeper and wrote about how their favorite part is their heritage because it connects them to their family. These writing prompts also served as a low-pressure way for me to gauge students' individual writing skills and collect a beginning-of-year sample for their writing portfolios.
This student did not focus on a physical part of her body but instead wrote about her heritage and how it connects to her goals. She shows a thoughtfulness in her writing (and the picture she chose to include) that set her apart from her peers.
This student chose to write a poem about his teeth, which showcased not only his sense of humor, but also his understanding of poetic elements such as rhyme scheme and line breaks.
My unit plans for social studies serve a similar purpose, although they are less detailed due to our shortened class time. I use my unit plans to keep track of the guiding questions that go with each week's topic, which helps me stay focused when selecting read-alouds and activities on a weekly basis. In addition, planning ahead of time for the authentic student work that students will be producing ensures that I am including a variety of ways for my students to demonstrate their understanding of what we have learned that week.
My unit plans for social studies include our topic of focus, guiding questions, and authentic student work.
Like my unit plans for reading, my unit plans for social studies also include the week's guiding questions. These guiding questions help anchor our discussion and focus during our read-alouds and the experiential activities students participate in to help bring the history concepts to life. For example, when learning about taxation without representation, one of our guiding questions was "Why was taxation without representation unfair?" Students participated in a simulation of taxation without representation where one student was the "king" and passed laws that required all of the other students to pay him. Participating in that activity, combined with the readings we did about the issue, helped students understand the issue more deeply, and that guiding question was included on the written reflection that students completed after the activity.
Complete written reflections after social studies activities help students solidify the connections between the activity and the historical concept. I also use the reflections to assess how well students are understanding the material and gauge if the activities are having the intended benefits. Both of these students receive ESL services and have different levels of mastery with syntax and spelling, but they were both able to express their feelings about the activity and connect the activity to the colonists.
Another activity that helped bring history to life was creating Revolutionary War spy codes. After learning about some of the methods that men and women spies used during the Revolutionary War, students created their own code and cipher to create a coded message that could have been sent during that historical time period. This activity required students to think about the messages that would have been sent during war, and helped them understand how long communication would have taken. This activity also integrated cross-disciplinary skills, as students had to use text evidence, background knowledge, and make reasonable inferences while writing their message. All of these skills are ones that we practice in reading class, so by including this activity in my social studies plans, I was ensuring that students had more opportunities to apply these skills.
This student was able to create a message that included a real historical place (Valley Forge) and accurately depict the wartime conditions of that battle (low food and ammo supplies, "probably frozen").
This student, who receives ESL services, mentioned a real historical place but his message lacked structure and details. In the future, I will spend more time discussing some of the important battles and challenges of the Revolutionary War to build students' background knowledge and help them with this activity.