As I am reading the chapter, I am thinking about how challenging it is to plan every month, than every week and than every day for a class to learn successfully. You have to know students interest and students pace of learning to teach successfully. I recently took over the leading of a class since the previous lead teacher left us for another job. The fact that our class is made up of 17 boys out of 20 students age 4 and 5 years old makes teaching have its daily challenges. The first section of the book I am talking about is "Thinkfinity: Online lesson development resources. I am always looking for educational resources which made me look up thinkfinity. This website lead me to a website called wonderopolis.org which I thought looked fun and interesting. It shows different questions that children might ask and explains the aswer to it. The questions are called wonders and they are sorted in different grade levels and subjects. The first question of the section about thinkfinity is "What do I teach Monday morning?" A question familiar to me. I start my planning a week ahead which gives me enough time to think about theme, resources and learning lessons. One of my favorite Website to find homework review sheets for the children is called www.kidzone.ws
The next section I would like to talk about is "enhancing lesson development with technology". I found an article from Concordia online education called "How to use technology to enhance a lesson". it describes how to change textbooks, notebooks, pencils and chalkboards, the traditional teaching materials, to modern technology tools like projectors, whiteboards and computer games. The book divides lesson development in to 3 different parts: Academic content(what to teach), Teaching goals, methods and procedures(How to teach) and learning assessments(knowing what students have learned). The book explains academic content as the choices teachers make every day about how to share facts, concepts, ideas, skills and understandings. It also says that school system guidelines and state and national curriculum frameworks define or mandate what will be taught. Teacher must connect their plannings to local curriculum frameworks which are aligned to state and national standards. As a VPK Teacher, I follow the "Florida Early Learning and Developmental standards for 4 year olds". These are the goals of what our children need to learn and we integrate and mark them in our lesson plans. The book describes goals as the reasons why a lesson is being taught. The book also describes the section "How to teach" as the answer to "what to teach". Teachers decide the goals, methods and procedures they will use to teach. Methods are the instructional strategies teachers use to convey academic content to students. Procedures are the scheduling and grouping of students during a lesson and the decision of how much time to spend on each activity. Like I already mentioned earlier, our VPK students learn mostly by hands on learning lessons. They have 45 minutes a day to work individually on teacher made lessons on trays or in baskets that are provided for them in the classroom. Like I mentioned, 17 boys are a challenge to keep occupied. For this reason, I use a lot of technology in my learning circles. I have one in the morning and one at the end of VPK time. The morning describes day, date, month and year, a morning procedure of singing songs and the discussion of the theme. The closing circle wraps up the day and tells about the next day. If the boys can't focus between the time of wrapping up and lunch time, we sit in front of youtube.com and find educational songs about counting, spelling and compound words. The variety is big and the boys have fun singing most of the songs. According to the book, the part "Learning assessments describes the knowledge of what students have learned. It says that Learning assessments occur before, during and after teaching lessons and enable teachers to evaluate students knowledge, understanding and performance. Our VPK students have to do an assessment at the beginning of the year, in the middle of the year and towards the end of the year. The assessment is in a catalog in form of questions and pictures that teachers read and show to the students to find out if they have learned their goals. The questions are about letters, numbers, language understanding and speaking. In my opinion, I am not sure if those standardized tests are the right method to assess 4 year old children since they can be in different moods on different days or don't want to talk or answer even if they know the questions and the contents. This makes us have lower results for students who actually work and understand more during classtime. I believe knowledge should be measured during actual lesson time.
The next section of the book that I want to talk about is using technology in lesson planning. This video explains how technology can be an aid in creating lesson plans.
The book points out that the internet provides vast electronic resources for supporting lesson development using the student learning objectives and understanding by design approaches. It also says that already assembled lesson plans on virtually every topic and innumerable ideas for designing engaging learning experiences for students are available free at educational websites. I started to be a teacher when all this technology was already available for us as resources and I think this is a great and convenient way to find ideas and material for lesson plans. I could never imagine a way of just flipping pages in a book and going around art stores to find ideas. Since we live in the technology age, life is made easy for teachers. However I also use magazines, books and school material to plan my lessons. I just got a hold of different mailbox magazines with tons of different ideas for each month and each season. I also use social network sites to share and pin ideas from and to other teachers. Also, I think if we research online for teaching material, we need to be aware of the sources and the websites we use as material for teaching. The material should come from teaching websites and should be age appropriate and safe to use for the specific age group we teach. I have fun with planning and researching. I love to look for small science projects for the children to try out. It turns exploring with them into a little adventure and it is always trial and error. We never know if our experiments work or don't work. finding the right, appropriate fun things makes planning fun and teaching and learning fun.
resources:
Concordia online education (2011) How to use Technology to enhance a lesson, retrieved from http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/tech-ed/how-to-use-technology-to-enhance-a-lesson/
Florida Early Learning and Developmental Standards for 4-year Olds retrieved from http://www.floridaearlylearning.com/parents/parent_resources/floridas_early_learning_and_development_standards_birth_to_five.aspx
Freitag, Julia (2015) plan, learn, teach, fun, research...(picture) retrieved from wordle.net
www.kidzone.ws
Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
NDTV (2014) How can Technology aid a teachers lesson plan? retrieved from youtube.com
www.wonderopolis.org
Planning, a critical component of teaching, is definitely a time-consuming process - and one that has been eased by technology access...though, with the 'addicting' use internet searching and social websites, I'm not sure it takes any less time! :) It does provide a treasure trove of good sharing, though.
ReplyDeleteAs a current teacher you understand the expected standards and those will often be tweaked along the way, but they are the guiding source of our teaching. You do have your challenges with so many active preschoolers, but what a great experience.