Response to Literacy Observation

I really enjoyed this experience because I got to see how one teaches literacy to students. As I am in the gym all day, I don’t get to see a lot of quality classroom instruction and by observing a 6th grade language arts teacher teach a poetry lesson to students I got to see firsthand how having a strong grasp of the material can make a lesson more enthusiastic. When kids see that their teacher has a passion for their material, they are more likely to be engaged and learning. I witnessed the teacher using technology by giving her students the opportunity to research poems and topics for students to create their own work. Technology is something that I feel is vitally important for kids to be able to use, so it was good to see another teacher using it during the course of her lesson.

Science Literacy Plan

This unit was much easier for me to create than the math unit plan, because I have a much better grasp of the subject material. Science is also a very interesting topic for me, because studying nature and the life in it has always been a passion of mine. Creating lessons where students are actually able to explore and environment and be able to reach out and touch what they see can be a very inspiring and motivating way to teach and that is what I feel I have accomplished with this unit plan.

Math Unit Plan

Wanting to use teacher collaboration, I had my students work with the librarian to select books to read each night. Students would then share the number of books they read each night with their classmates and the students would transform that data into a series of different graphs to help illustrate the number of books each student read. This unit plan was fairly difficult for me to grasp. I am not a classroom teacher and not particularly good at math, so creating a lesson for students that would incorporate math and literacy was fairly challenging. The social studies and content unit plans were much easier for me to create, but I believe that this unit plan is a good start.

Response to Music Literacy Lesson Plan

This unit really made me think about incorporating literacy into my physical education classes. Dance is obviously a very good area in PE for using music and by creating a unit plan they had students use the internet to research dances from different cultures students were able to use technology and understand the different streams of information presented to them. These are two of the 21st century literacy strategies that are I feel are very important for students to understand and utilize as they progress through school. I also wanted to incorporate as many strategies as possible from my toolkit, so I used teacher collaboration, literacy in my content area and had students discuss their findings.