Early Planning

My partner and I have decided to create a fourth grade unit on biographies, incorporating language arts, social studies and technology benchmarks into the plan. We will utilize technology in the media center and the classroom in order to enhance children's knowledge of reading and writing biographies, as well as reviewing research skills and skills necessary to locate biographies in the library. While planning for our collaborative unit, my hope is to achieve Level 8 of Loertscher's Taxonomy: Implementation of the four major programmatic elements of the LMC program. (Loertscher, 2000) The four elements include collaboration, reading literacy, enhancing learning through technology and information literacy. I feel that our meetings and discussions so far are at the collaborative level. We are able to dialogue on what would be best-fit in the classroom and in the media center with our unit. As the media specialist, I will make print sources available for student use in researching and writing biographies. I will also work to find sources at multiple reading levels in order to meet the needs of all of our 4th grade students. My partner and I will also be making technology available to the students in the media center and in the classroom. We will be using various sites for research purposes as well as to explore the lives of famous people. All of our efforts together for creating the lesson to meet the benchmarks of language arts, and social studies with technology integration are examples of the information literacy provided within the unit.

After viewing the unit plan checklist. I divided up the tasks according to when my partner and I will meet and what we will cover. The basics of the unit have already been established through informal discussions with one another. The next steps of the plan that involve what objectives we will cover, the prior knowledge the students have, our big idea and the standards we will cover will be established at our meeting this week together. We do have some ideas as to the big idea of the lesson, but more discussion will be needed to establish which exact benchmarks we will be covering. In addition, at this time after viewing the benchmarks, it will be helpful to define the assessments we will be using at the end of the lesson. Using, the "backward planning" method that was mentioned previously in our text, we will be looking at the benchmarks first and then moving backwards to decide the assessments first and then the activities we will use to meet these benchmarks. At our second meeting together, within the next 2 weeks, we will begin to compile the activities we will use to teach the specific objectives of our lesson. We will find resources needed (print and web), the teaching activities we will use and how we will link each of the activities together within the unit.

This part of the process I feel is the most exciting! It is very neat to watch two minds put their ideas together and to watch the lessons come to life. I love being able to share technology knowledge with a classroom teacher and having them be able to supplement it within the classroom and vise versa. I am so glad to have this opportunity to collaborate with Dave.

Loertscher, D. (2000). Taxonomies of the school library media program. Salt Lake City: Hi Willow Research and Publishing.