Lessons!

This week I’ve been working on completing three of the six lesson plans. Doing this after the calendar was the best idea because having the whole unit mapped out gives me a ton of day lessons to pick and expand on. This week I’m working on the sequence lesson (2) and a reciprocal learning lesson (1).

The reciprocal learning lesson will be a modification of the lesson I did for my EdTPA lesson at Curie. For that lesson, the day was spent reading excerpts from banned books and doing the traditional lit circle roles. For this class in particular, it was their first time doing reciprocal learning, which is why the roles were done in class as opposed to the traditional sequence where students complete roles at home and bring them to class for discussion-based groupwork. I liked doing this because it worked out to be a very good format for workshopping lit circles, and also it was just a good day activity that can easily be used and modified for any lesson/unit/subject. This is why I’ve chosen to include it in my unit! Since we’re using our real classrooms, I will treat this reciprocal learning lesson as a second-time workshop that responds to the necessary modifications students need as evidenced by the artifacts they produced the first time around. It will also be the last time lit circles and reciprocal learning are workshopped before it is implemented in the schedule as a regular activity/homework. The lit circles will also be different in this case because instead of using a variety of banned books, students will have read a few chapters of “The Fault In Our Stars” by John Green.

The sequence lesson will be closer to the end of the unit. The lessons will be preps for the “transitions” section of their portfolio, a pretty large chunk of their final project and grade. The first prep will consist of a lesson (a bit longer than a mini-lesson) and model (teacher-led). The second will consist of workshopping the previous days lesson and modeling. I’m struggling a bit with this sequence because I haven’t created many lecture-based lessons, so it’s just taking some extra time to make sure that my prezi a) isn’t boring the hell out of them and b) is engaging and informative. This means spending a lot of time creating a guided worksheet and tweaking the colors and fonts to make it look fun!

Hope everyone’s unit chunks are coming along smoothly!