Summer work
Aug. 3rd, 2010 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ennierdaToday has been Lesson Planning day.
In years past, I have failed miserably at summer prep. You know - I ended up at the beach instead, or watching movies, or just farting around on the internet. Part of it was certainly the distractions that summer offers, but part of it was just intimidation over how to begin such a big job. It was a lot easier to plan week-by-week than taking a look at the big picture. After five years of experience in a school where I had to come up with the curriculum, Religion being unregulated by any outside body, I have got a bit better idea on how to plan a course and am determined to do better this summer.
First, I did some brainstorming. Then I looked over the last teacher's notes and have been reassured to find that I came up with the same ideas as her. The biggest problem with her notes is that they are not arranged into unit plans, unless you count an ENTIRE QUARTER as a unit. Therefore, since we agreed on what the course goals should be, I just need to break her notes down into units, then I can start working on actual lessons. A big decision for me is going to be: should grammar, writing and literature happen every day, maybe fifteen minutes for each, or should I include seperate "writing days" and "reading days" in each unit? The old teacher did half and half each class - starting with grammar OR writing, then ending with literature.
I'm torn on if the students should read at home. The old teacher had them do all their reading in class, on the theory that they were just going to read the cliff notes on the internet. However, she also assigned them a fair amount of writing that they did at home, so maybe doing the reading in class was a way of giving them a break. Certainly some reading needs to be done in class, to work on improving the comprehension and analytic skills. I will think on this some more.
Anyway, I'm feeling like I could have accomplished more today, but I got a start, which is more than I've ever done.
In years past, I have failed miserably at summer prep. You know - I ended up at the beach instead, or watching movies, or just farting around on the internet. Part of it was certainly the distractions that summer offers, but part of it was just intimidation over how to begin such a big job. It was a lot easier to plan week-by-week than taking a look at the big picture. After five years of experience in a school where I had to come up with the curriculum, Religion being unregulated by any outside body, I have got a bit better idea on how to plan a course and am determined to do better this summer.
First, I did some brainstorming. Then I looked over the last teacher's notes and have been reassured to find that I came up with the same ideas as her. The biggest problem with her notes is that they are not arranged into unit plans, unless you count an ENTIRE QUARTER as a unit. Therefore, since we agreed on what the course goals should be, I just need to break her notes down into units, then I can start working on actual lessons. A big decision for me is going to be: should grammar, writing and literature happen every day, maybe fifteen minutes for each, or should I include seperate "writing days" and "reading days" in each unit? The old teacher did half and half each class - starting with grammar OR writing, then ending with literature.
I'm torn on if the students should read at home. The old teacher had them do all their reading in class, on the theory that they were just going to read the cliff notes on the internet. However, she also assigned them a fair amount of writing that they did at home, so maybe doing the reading in class was a way of giving them a break. Certainly some reading needs to be done in class, to work on improving the comprehension and analytic skills. I will think on this some more.
Anyway, I'm feeling like I could have accomplished more today, but I got a start, which is more than I've ever done.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 09:33 pm (UTC)I have a REALLY hard time getting kids to read at home. Whenever I have an assignment with home-reading or a novel, I get tons and tons of students simply failing the assignment or unit. It depresses the hell out of me. A colleague has students take notes on *everything*, and I need to talk to him about this technique--how he teaches them to annotate and such.
Still, kids not doing their work shouldn't be a reason not to assign it. Some advice I *did* give my student teacher right off the bat--whatever classwork you have kids do after a reading assignment, make sure it's not a group assignment or whole-class discussion/activity that relies on most of the kids having read the material. It will crash and burn. :(
I always do Beowulf aloud, with the explanation that it was oral tradition in the first place. I also do Macbeth aloud for similar reasons, and it's also easier to break into for explanations (I switch who reads the parts each scene).
I generally do grammar at the beginning of every class period, and fit in writing whenever I've assigned something. Since the writing usually builds off of the themes in the lit, that's what it will cut into.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-04 12:17 pm (UTC)I am leaning grammar every day, because on reflection, the students will need the continual practice. I've seen how they write.
One excellent idea that the old teacher had for teaching grammar was to use sentences from student writing to teach common errors and how to edit your own work. She would put a star next to sentences on student papers that she thought were teachable, and then ask students to write those sentences on the board. Then the whole class would correct the sentences together. Some days when I observed, this made up the entire grammar lesson for the day. I presume she'd taught these writing errors earlier in the year.