Artifact 3

This unit was developed during my pre-service training for my Children’s Literature course. I developed this Language arts unit with a group of three other interns using the internet, researching novels and other texts for the fifth grade curriculum.

Impact

The unit includes fifth grade historical fiction books for below and above grade level. Students are split into different groups according to their reading level and daily they read selected pages and write according to the specific job they have. After completing their specific jobs they discuss what they have found within their jobs. This unit corresponds to the NC Standard Course of Study for both language arts and social studies; competencies addressed are listed in the unit. As a web resource, this unit will be available to other teachers and colleagues.

Alignment

This unit helps teachers navigate easily because of targets and links specific to the literature circle. This unit organizes and manages strategies that support student involvement, inquiry, and collaboration by making teachers aware of how they should split their class into groups by the different reading levels (Tech Comp 12.5 and INTASC #3). This unit also selects and creates learning experiences that are appropriate for curriculum goals by using the internet so students can look up the unit on the web to find informative links to further research the Great Depression and Civil Rights movement and see the visuals from both eras (Tech Comp 12.7). Since students will be looking up and citing internet resources for the Investigator role, I would talk to my students and state our classroom policies for citation of web resources (Tech Comp 14.1). While using the literature circles unit students will be asked to research information on the web and communicate this information to the other students by then writing or drawing (Tech Comp 12.1). I used school television as a resource by showing a segment of a video on the Civil Rights movement in my launch (Tech Comp 10.2). As I developed my literature circle unit I had to prepare the different texts and jobs according to the reading levels of my students, the social studies subject matter, and the curriculum goals for fifth graders; these jobs encourage students development of critical thinking skills, problem solving skills and performance skills on the end of grade tests for North Carolina (INTASC #4). This unit was developed with the knowledge of the fifth grade student and the curriculum goals for English, Social Studies and Technology. The different reading levels and jobs were developed to suit the needs of the different fifth graders in the classroom. The unit was put on the web to be a resource for teachers (so they can create their own lit circle unit) and parents in the community so they can be aware of what is happening in the classroom (INTASC # 7).