Lesson Plans

Some standard teacher tasks still overwhelm me. Lesson planning is one such task. While I was working on my master's, our literacy class was asked to develop a week's worth of informal literacy lesson plans during yesterday's class. My group was excited to dive into something so obviously practical and useful. We reviewed the examples of daily schedules and literacy blocks we'd been given by our professor, leafed through the books and supplies we were to use in our lessons (an insect and butterfly theme), and quickly became activity generating machines!

We could visit the community garden! Or a butterfly house! Plant butterfly-attracting plants at school! Have caterpillars in the classroom! Create a paper and felt garden with the class!The kids could create pretend seed packets and plant stakes! A gardening themed play center!

Fortunately, it didn't take us long to realize that, while we were not lacking enthusiasm about our topic, we'd forgotten our goal: to create literacy lesson plans. This, I think (I hope) is a common pitfall for novices. We're so excited about getting into a classroom and teaching kids new things that we lose sight of the vital structure that makes a classroom enriching, not enraging.

Back on track, we focused on developing specific types of literacy activities that matched our theme. We could write about where the butterflies in Waiting for Wings go once they are fully grown. We could raise caterpillars in the classroom and write down our observations as they changed from larva to caterpillar to butterfly. Word work would focus on breaking apart and assembling -ing words. Lessons were actually starting to take shape.

A very helpful reminder came from our professor at the end of class. She said two things I'll need to remember to keep myself from going crazy. First, it doesn't need to be cute for the sake of being cute, and next, building one richly connected literacy unit a year is plenty. I should not try to have an entire school year of in-depth cross-curricular units created my first year teaching.

Briefly, I was overwhelmed by this experience. I worried that even my enthusiasm was now a potential handicap. Now though, my take away is this: when it comes to teaching, too much enthusiasm is less of a problem than not enough.

Teaching and Learning with Popular Media

Many of my blog posts have focused on the importance of using a variety of media and activities in order to engage students in developing literacy skills. In the past few weeks, we have been able to put those ideas into practice. Myself and another pre-service teacher helped the early readers we have been working with this semester make a movie.

The students we have been working with are kindergartners. Each has a very different personality. One is very eager and talkative, but likes to focus on exactly how characters are portrayed in books or movies. The other student is very shy and needs much encouragement to participate. Knowing that, we went to their kindergarten class with picture books and art supplies, ready to engage the students in telling us about what interests them. Myself and the other pre-service teacher told them that we were going to help them make a movie about anything they wanted! This turned out to be an overwhelming offer and both students told us they did not have any ideas. This is when relying on popular media came in handy.

We immediately asked about movies the students had recently seen. Had they seen anything they really liked? Would movies they like be fun to recreate here? With some careful questioning we were able to find out that our more talkative student had recently seen a movie about dinosaurs he called Meet the Dinosaurs. He told us it was a very new movie, still in theaters, and that it was okay that we hadn't heard of it. I did some investigating on the internet and found a 1999 made-for-TV movie called Meet the Dinosaurs, but I also found out that there is a Discover the Dinosaurs show happening in Indianapolis in addition to The Children's Museum's dinosaurs attractions. Wherever the interest came from, we had an enthusiastic dinosaur expert. As we suspected, our shier student was happy to go along with this suggestion.

To make the movie, we gave the students the options to be the dinosaurs themselves or to make dinosaurs for their movie. They opted to make dinosaurs and we provided our two students with paper and drawing materials in order to create the characters. With our dinosaur enthusiast explaining who the main characters were in the movie, we helped create a background and the start of dinosaur shapes. Our movie was a work in progress from start to finish. We filmed a few scenes when the students decided we needed to create two more dinosaurs, so it was back to the art supplies before we shot more footage.

Working with the kindergartners to make a movie taught me to be open-minded to whatever topic they were interested in and also to however they wanted to make their movie. The students we worked with did not have any interest in planning a story out ahead of time. The student who had seen the dinosaur movie usually started the scene wanting to replicate something he'd seen in the movie, but usually switched to playing a dinosaur who just ate everything. I enjoyed letting the students decide what made sense to do next while facilitating an end product. 

Playing with Literacy

Just as a child progresses through different levels of learning to read, so does the child who develops literacy skills through play. Children may start by mimicking social situations they have seen in their daily lives (talking on the phone, shopping, making dinner, etc.), but as the child is allowed to play through the literacy skills they observe in life their play evolves as well. Students begin using familiar characters to recreate favorite stories from books, movies, or TV. They may even make up new adventures for their favorite characters.

In order to learn about this process from the student's point of view, we were asked in class to use McDonald's Happy Meal toys to make a short movie. We were instructed to subvert the intended use of the toys. Our group had a stuffed animal, two scantily clad fairy women, a robotic dog-type pet, and Sherman from the cartoon Mr. Peabody and Sherman. Immediately one of our group members suggested that the fairies rescue Sherman. We opted to create a series of short situations in which Sherman finds himself trapped and the fairy women must rescue him. I believe we found it easier to work outside the original plot lines of theses characters because, for the most part, we were not familiar with the TV shows and movies from which they originated. This process was helpful for me, though, to see how students ideas evolve from expectation, to story ideas, to play.

There are many other ways to encourage play as a literacy-strengthening activity. For instance, Literacy Playshop suggests "Playing Action Scripts with Puppets." This activity helps students focus on communicating ideas through movements and actions. In this process, narration is used sparingly and the story is explained through the puppets actions and dialogue. Children must stretch their creative muscles in order to get away from tradition descriptive narration. What a useful tool for demonstrating different types of writing in an engaging way. I think this would be a very useful activity for second or third graders who have enough independent writing skills to begin to experiment with different narrative techniques and story structures. This activity is also useful for helping students understand the story in a read aloud text. The students develop ownership of the story and characters if they have firsthand experience with the situation.

It is important to allow students as many different ways to engage with curriculum. We do not use our ability to read for reading only one type of text, so why should students develop literacy skills through one type of activity. Using various kinds of play, whether it is puppet shows, movie-making, or role playing in the classroom, students engage with literacy on different levels when they play with it.