Saturday, 10 December 2016

Standards and Backwards Mapping

ELA Common Core Standards

This week for our new module we had to choose a standard and use a strategy called backwards mapping to design a curriculum and lesson plans. It is a process where teachers create goals, assessments and learning experiences/ activities by starting at the end: what is the desired result? After that, you can start thinking of how you will help the students achieve that goal (through assessments and activities).

My Choice of Standard:

I chose a standard from the English Language Art (ELA) Common Core standards: RL.2.4:
Describe how words and phrases (e.g., regular beats, alliteration, rhymes, repeated lines) supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song.
I have always had a love of literature, especially poetry, and I have my parents and elementary teachers to thank for that. Currently, there is a big literacy problem, especially in South Africa, my motherland. Children are not reading enough anymore and if I can show children how fun literature can be, maybe I can help them achieve a good literacy level, which will help them in many aspects in their life.

 I plan on teaching Elementary Education, 2nd Grade, because it is a very interesting age where students are busy becoming independent readers and writers. They are starting to get used to using appropriate vocabulary to form opinions and describe their thoughts and feelings. And what best way to practice that through the language of feelings: poetry!

 In the subject, English Literature, I will teach a literature unit on Poetry. In my opinion, poetry should not be taught as a short unit, but instead if possible throughout the school year or semester. This will encourage enthusiasm for poetry (and the language arts) and also raise its value. There are so many ELA standards that you can reach through poetry alone (writing, reading, speaking, listening, comprehension etc.). That is why it is a good idea to teach it throughout the year (once or twice a week) and apply your knowledge when acquiring other standards in other subjects. A variety of topics gives students experience in rich literature, opinion pieces, stories, letters and explanations together with building grammatical knowledge, practice reading for meaning and join in conversations.

4 Proficiencies

  1. Recognize and identify rhythm, rhyme and alliteration in a poem.
  2. Explain how rhythmic words and phrases add meaning to a poem.
  3. Demonstrate reading comprehension through illustrations and answering questions.
  4. Apply knowledge of rhythm,, rhyme and alliteration to construct own poetry.

Assessments

I will use pre-assessments, formative and summative assessments to test their understanding of the standard.

Pre-assessment
Before the unit starts, I will assess the students' background knowledge and opinions of poetry with a poetry survey. This will give me an idea of where the students are with developing their opinion and their interests in poetry. This will also help me to adapt my teaching style and strategies to fit a certain group of students.

 Formative assessment
Comprehension
Students will read and comprehend a big amount of fiction and nonfiction poetry while assessed with a scoring guide on comprehension.
 
This will include questions on rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and the meaning of the poem. Later students will be able to form their own opinions on poetry as well, in order to develop critical thinking skills. 

Poetry Checklist 
Students will show and/or describe how words and phrases in a poem have rhythm which helps them build meaning. Students will explain how meaning builds from a previous line. Students will explain and correctly use the correct meaning of many meaning words and real life uses, assessed through a checklist and/or teacher observation.

 Summative assessment
Writing and reading aloud poetry
Students will write poetry during classes throughout the year/ semester and 2 times within that time period, they will choose their best poem to create an audio/visual presentation (choose easy obtainable and user friendly technology) to be presented to a younger class. This project will be assessed with a scoring guide.

 Graphic Organizer/ Poetry book
Students will have a poetry book where they can write ideas for their own poetry assignments. They can also include illustrations to show what the meaning of their poetry are. This will be continually assessed.

Learning experiences/ activities

The main goal at first will be the comprehension of poetry, because through this the students' understanding of poetic elements and meaning will be enhanced.

Alliteration Activities


Rhyme activities and games


Rhythm activities
This will include clapping to a read aloud and doing worksheets on  counting how many beats are in each line. This will also allow the students to identify patterns in a poem (see the musical center in the next section)

Learning Centers (practice)
I am a firm believer of using learning centers to enhance the students' learning experience of certain subjects.
  • Language center: where students can collect interesting words/ phrases from poems they have read or heard.
  • Illustration center (or poetry window): this will include writing utensils to describe/ illustrate what they see or hear when reading a poem using sensory words.
  • Listening center: where students can listen to performance poetry and teach their ear to identify poetic elements (rhythm, rhyme, alliteration).
  • Musical center: this will include instruments or noise makers for students to identify and describe sounds in order to use it in their poetry.
  • Computer center: there are so many digital tools available to enhance students' learning experiences: (Example) Construct-a word: the students can select a word ending and create a list of rhyming words. They can print their words and use it in their poetry book.
  • Reading center: include poetry books for students to read as much poetry as possible. To make it more engaging, print out some poems and let the students highlight or circle poetic elements. They can use this to include in their poetry book.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

References

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)