Artifact 8

Context:
I created this lesson plan in my Social Studies in the Elementary School class during my block experience. We were told to integrate this lesson with our literature circles unit plan, whose subject is also the Great Depression. In this lesson plan I review facts about the Dust Bowl and show video clips from the movie “The Grapes of Wrath”.

Impact:
When I am in the classroom, I will use this lesson plan as a part of a unit to teach children about the Great Depression. I will teach this lesson while also teaching a literature unit plan about the Great Depression. This will enable students to learn about both topics in a variety of subject areas. I will use the video “The Grapes of Wrath” to introduce the topic of the Oklahoma Migration.

Alignment:
Since I used clips from a video in this lesson plan, I used television resources. In the lesson plan I included which objectives students would be meeting to support the curriculum. So I used television school resources to support the curriculum (Tech Comp 10.2).

While showing different video clips to children during this lesson plan, I will use the VCR remote to fast-forward or rewind to the parts I would like to show. By doing this I am using a wireless resource in a classroom lesson (Tech Comp 12.6).

In this lesson plan, I used resources for teaching from the Internet. I listed the URLs that I used in this lesson at the bottom of the lesson plan (Tech Comp 10.3).

I created this lesson plan in order to teach the curriculum goals of fifth-graders in the subject of social studies. In this lesson I listed the curriculum goals, which will be met by teaching this lesson. This shows I planned instruction based on the curriculum goals. Also I know that students can come up with great ideas if they are in groups and can discuss it with others. So in the lesson plan I placed students into groups to foster discussion. In this lesson I had students research information before coming into class. Since the community I am currently in is very rural, I did not know if students would have access to a public library. Taking into account community resources, I decided to take class time to have students research information in the library. In the discipline of social studies, when dealing with maps, visuals are needed to display information. By providing maps (visuals) for each group, I proved I have an understanding of teaching methods that are unique to this discipline. (Standard #7).

This lesson plan documents my knowledge of subject matter in many topics. These topics are the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the Oklahoma Migration. By reading the book used in this lesson (The Dust Bowl), and researching information about the Great Depression on the web sites listed in the lesson, I have proven my knowledge of the subject matter. In the lesson students must do a KWL (where they say what they Know or think they know about the subject, what they Want to know about the subject, and then what they have Learned after an experience). By having students write what they think they know about a subject, they have made a hypothesis, which is a tool of inquiry. By teaching geography, history, and economics (which are some of the themes of social studies), I have shown that I know the central concepts and structures of the discipline. Through the activities planned in the lesson, I have created meaningful activities for the students (Standard # 1).