| Title of Lesson: | Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad |
| Your Name: | Susie Metrick |
| Your Email Address: | smetrick@edc.org |
| Your School District: | EDC |
| Grade Level: | 1 |
| Literacy Focus: | Reading and writing. Drawing upon two children's literature classics--Frog and Toad are Friends and Frog and Toad Together--children will engage in reading and writing activities as they explore these and other works of fiction and non-fiction. Children will also conduct research about children's literature and related content areas (e.g., learning more about frogs and toads and their habitat) for ongoing projects that incorporate original writing and illustrations. To culminate this lesson, children will publish their projects using new technologies such as the school web site. |
| National or District Standards you plan to target: |
Reading in the fiction and nonfiction genre (i.e., science); developing phonemic awareness and decoding skills; learning to write across the curriculum within a process writing framework; conducting research; working cooperatively with peers. In addition, fostering children's ability to use new tools for: a) research; b) creative expression; and c) publication. |
| Length of Unit (approximately): | 6 weeks |
Throughout this lesson, children will work in groups on one of these two projects:
My overall goal is to integrate informal assessments throughout this lesson, so that I can gain a sense of children's learning processes and their progress, rather than just assessing their final products. Another goal is to assess what children can do, not just what they can't do. Also, I want to give children an opportunity to engage in self-assessment and reflection.
To achieve these goals, I am planning to use a variety of assessment strategies, as summarized here:
Portfolio Ideas
Each student will keep a portfolio of his or her work throughout all phases of the unit, including contributions to the group project.
Rubric Ideas
I will use the "Six-Trait Assessment for Beginning Writers", developed by the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, to assess students' writing development in the areas of ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. An overview of how to use this assessment is at http://www.nwrel.org/eval/writing/primary.html and the rubric is available in PDF format at: http://www.nwrel.org/eval/writing/Primary.PDF
Student-Teacher Conferences
I will conference with individual students and with each team of children to discuss their final products and collaboration processes. For example, did the group generate other ideas that weren't incorporated in the final products? How did the group make decisions? If they were starting over right now, would they do anything differently? I will also ask each student to reflect on what he/she enjoyed most about working on the project, and about what was most difficult.
| Return to Outline | Next
|
Copyright © 2000, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)