Creating Curriculum – Blog 5
Moorea C -
Hey everyone! I hope all of you are having a wonderful day 🙂 For this weeks blog I am going to be talking about how I have started to develop my curriculum for the 2nd and 3rd graders.
My final step of this project consists of testing out everything I have learned by teaching the 2nd and 3rd grade classes here at BASIS Prescott a lesson about recycling. For this endeavor, I will be using my very own curriculum developed from scratch using everything I have learned throughout my research journey. What exactly does developing a curriculum from scratch consist of? It consists of setting learning objectives/goals for a class and in turn creating the materials necessary to teach the students. For my curriculum, I am developing a Do-Now, a lesson (general teaching in front of the class and visual aids), a reading comprehension story, two activities (group vs. individual work), an exit ticket, and my pre-test/post-test. I had three main goals this week: 1. setting my learning objectives, 2. creating my pre-test/post-test, and 3. working on creating my activities.
- Setting my learning objectives was pretty simple. Because I am teaching on a topic like recycling, there is only so much you can really cover for this young of an age group. My plan is to cover three objectives: 1. Understanding the 3 R’s, 2. Understanding the basics of recycling and what gets recycled, 3. Understanding the basics of composting and what gets composted. With my objectives set in my place, I did a bit of brainstorming for a visual aid that I will create to use in my lesson (pictured below).
Pictured: Brainstorming for a visual aid to use in my teaching. - Creating my pre-test/post-test was the trickiest thing to work on this week. Because I am not familiar with the groups of students I will be teaching, creating the test comes with a lot of back and forth comparisons to science tests online and working with the math and science teacher to figure out a good balance between a challenging, but not impossible test. I will attach the link to my rough draft document for the test below. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fk3a8eiVBe9ky3_vpSzVYsctRwOH6nsWX8fMi3xuXLc/edit?usp=sharing
- Working on developing my activities is pretty fun for me because I get to be pretty creative with what I choose to have the students do. This week I focused on creating my individual activity which is going to be a “cut and paste” sorting activity. I created a worksheet filled with 14 items for the students to cut out. Using what the students learn in the classroom about recycling, they will take each item and paste it onto a separate poster that contains 3 trash bins (recycling, composting, garbage). Once they’re done, the current plan is that they will raise their hand to let me know so I can check their work and then the students will be able to decorate their poster however they would like.
Pictured: Individual “cut and paste” activity Thanks for reading and see you next week for more talk about curriculum!
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