Part IV. Teaching Materials
Teaching Artifact #1: “I Did It! Life-Changing Experiences:
A teaching unit for immigrant high school students”
Teaching Artifact #1: “I Did It! Life-Changing Experiences:
A teaching unit for immigrant high school students”
Creating teaching artifacts for this program has been one of the most rewarding and most time-consuming tasks I have ever completed. This small unit plan, consisting of five individual lessons, was created based on a reading entitled “Surfing II” from Discover America: Hawaii written by Edward and Virginia Klein (1986). The text is written at about an intermediate level, so I based my background information and overall student level on that criterion. The assignment was to take the reading and branch out to create five separate lessons. According to the directions from the professor, as long as the reading was used appropriately, it could be used anywhere in the lesson. It could be the core of the lesson, found at the end, or it could have been used as merely a supplementary text. I chose to use it as a reading for my students to gain a basic understanding of surfing. Then they were to read a short story about a boy whose first surfing experience was with his father. Since I chose to have my students and school in southern California, I thought that surfing could be relevant to them, but it probably was not an integral part of many of their lives.
The focus of the unit as a whole was based on the word experiences since I wanted my students to be able to relate different stories and ideas to experiences they had had in their own lives. Being able to relate the classroom content to their own lives makes it relevant to them and helps them become more communicative in their production of written and spoken language. I think that I was able to create five different lessons that could be both interesting and educational for my students. I chose to highlight this unit plan since it was the first large set of classroom teaching materials I had created for the MA TESOL program. I am proud of my own understanding of the importance of creating lesson plans and that, I believe, is evident in the hard work and the details that I put into creating each lesson plan for this unit.
Creating the teaching unit was also a very difficult task for me since this was the very first set of lesson plans I had to create for the program and the template used is much different from the one I had used during my undergrad and classroom teaching experience before. I felt quite defeated many times when receiving feedback from my professor since I thought I had understood what to do or felt that my lessons and activities would be successful. I now realize that there are many aspects of lesson planning that require more attention than I had thought. Moreover, even the plans that seem good at first must be tested in an actual classroom situation.
Click on this link to view the lesson plans and materials for “I Did It! Life-Changing Experiences: A teaching unit for immigrant high school students.”
The focus of the unit as a whole was based on the word experiences since I wanted my students to be able to relate different stories and ideas to experiences they had had in their own lives. Being able to relate the classroom content to their own lives makes it relevant to them and helps them become more communicative in their production of written and spoken language. I think that I was able to create five different lessons that could be both interesting and educational for my students. I chose to highlight this unit plan since it was the first large set of classroom teaching materials I had created for the MA TESOL program. I am proud of my own understanding of the importance of creating lesson plans and that, I believe, is evident in the hard work and the details that I put into creating each lesson plan for this unit.
Creating the teaching unit was also a very difficult task for me since this was the very first set of lesson plans I had to create for the program and the template used is much different from the one I had used during my undergrad and classroom teaching experience before. I felt quite defeated many times when receiving feedback from my professor since I thought I had understood what to do or felt that my lessons and activities would be successful. I now realize that there are many aspects of lesson planning that require more attention than I had thought. Moreover, even the plans that seem good at first must be tested in an actual classroom situation.
Click on this link to view the lesson plans and materials for “I Did It! Life-Changing Experiences: A teaching unit for immigrant high school students.”