Unit Planning
Literacy - Essential Question
I use the long term plan to inform my unit plans. Each of the literacy units provided by ​county has an essential question that each of the 7 cycles within the unit tie into. These essential questions are important themes that allow students to deepen their understanding on a certain topic. The essential questions for the four units of first grade are "How are things special?," "What makes a community?," "What changes over time?" and "How do animals live in our world?" These essential questions allow me to focus my lesson planning and follow up work to address the theme of the unit.
The four essential questions discussed above are an important opportunity to integrate learning across content areas. I am able to connect the theme of the literacy unit within my social studies, science and math lessons. Unit two's essential question is "What makes a community?" Within this unit, one of the guiding questions asks "what buildings do you know? What are they made of?" I integrated this guiding question into my MakerSpace math center to support cross-disciplinary skill development and allow students to apply their learning. The MakerSpace center allows students an opportunities to express their learning in different ways. This center is a creative and constructive way for students to develop stronger problem solving skills. The picture here shows the MakerSpace activity students completed during this unit. Students were given materials to make a building from their community. They then wrote about their building and why it is important. This helped connect their math and literacy learning.
Literacy - Phonics
As a first grade team, we realized that the phonics sequencing laid out by the Wonders curriculum was not logical and did not scaffold for strong student learning. We met during the summer for a full day of reordering our literacy plan. We used this day to list out all of the skills covered by the wonders curriculum, then re-organized them into the four units. We did this in a way that started with foundational skills such as letter names and sounds. We then progressed to more complicated skills such as digraphs. We paced out these skills throughout the unit on a shared calendar. This calendar helps ensure that we as a first grade team are aligned with each other and all of our students are receiving the same quality and sequenced education. This backwards planning also makes sure we know where we want to be by the end of the year, and make a logical assessment of what foundational skills students will need to find success in that. Understanding what skills students should master by the end of each unit also helps us create assessments to ensure students are mastering these skills.
The calendar here shows how I plan out my unit lessons. The calendar is based on my long term plan. I use the calendar to pace out when and in what order I will teach the skills presented in each unit. I track which cycle and day I will be teaching and which phonics skills I will work on for each day of the month. this allows me and the first grade team to ensure we are on pace and on track to teach and assess all standards during the unit. We also schedule our Fun-ics assessments to ensure all first grade students being assessed at the same time. We then use a collaborative planning session to review our data and adjust our lesson plans accordingly.
Literacy - Routine Writing
In addition to re-sequencing our phonics, we also reimagined the routine writing that accompanied the books in our curriculum. We found that the routine writing did not always align with the skills target in the curriculum and the writing strategies in the curriculum did not help students become fully independent and reflective writers. I was introduced to the RACES method of writing by my Teach for America coach. I worked with another first grade teacher to implement it in our classroom. When we found that it had been successful, we shared it with the rest of the first grade team. We made graphic organizers and a poster to align with this writing strategy. The pictures below shows what each of the letters stand for. Using this graphic organizer allows students to eventually write a complete paragraph, as is seen below. We reorganized the routine writing prompts to incorporate this graphic organizer and teach students each portion of the writing.
Days five through seven of each cycle are dedicated to writing fundamentals. On these days, we still teach phonics skills, as well as a structural or grammatical skills. We then read a text that aligns with a lesson from the Writing Fundamentals curriculum. While this curriculum offers an important opportunity to integrate culturally responsive texts, the provided lessons are not sequenced logically and do not support the development of a strong understanding of what writing is or the development of basic writing skills. The first unit in particular was developmentally inappropriate, asking students to complete tasks before they had been taught the prerequisite skills. As a first grade team, we redesigned the first unit to more closely resemble a writers workshop style curriculum. We selected texts we thought would be engaging and were reflective of our students’ lived experiences. We then introduced writing, in its most basic form, as telling. We showed students that writers can use pictures to tell a story. We then built on this by asking students to add words to their pictures and add more details. We then used the words we labeled in the picture to make a sentence. Breaking these writing skills down into developmentally appropriate steps help set our students up for greater writing success.
Math
Using the standards assigned by the county, one of the first grade teachers created math tests using test questions from previously mandated county tests, and some created on our own. These unit tests covered the skills students were expected to have mastered by the end of the unit. We use these to then backwards plan the lessons to help students master these skills. I use Google Slides to create math lessons. Each unit has a slideshow. This allows all skill to be grouped together and helps with future planning and remediation. I start each unit slideshow with an overview of the objectives and standards we will focus on throughout the upcoming lessons. This allows me to keep track of my goals for my students, and also allows me to easily refer back to our target skills while I am lesson planning for whole group and small group.
I use the standards I outlined for a unit to then thoroughly plan out learning activities and assessments to match. The detailed unit plan below shows how I backwards planned from a set of standards and created learning objectives, lesson plans, center activities, as well as foramtive and summative assessments.