| Title of Lesson: | Ben Franklin's Life and Times |
| Your Name: | Susie Metrick |
| Your Email Address: | smetrick@edc.org |
| Your School District: | EDC |
| Grade Level: | 4 |
| Literacy Focus: | Reading and writing in the content areas. Specifically, target book is Jean Fritz's What's the Big Idea, Ben Franklin? Connect to Revolutionary War history curriculum and science inventions, and biography genre. |
| National or District Standards you plan to target: | Reading nonfiction genre (i.e., history and biography); develop writing skills across the curriculum through process writing; conducting research; evaluating sources of information; working cooperatively with peers; developing vocabulary; fostering students' proficiency in using new tools for: a) research and b) to develop and communicate their ideas. |
| Length of Unit (approximately): | 7 weeks |
Throughout this lesson, students will work in groups on either of these two projects:
My overall goal is to integrate assessment throughout this lesson, so that I can gain a sense of students' learning processes and their progress, rather than just assessing their final products. Another goal is to assess what students can do, not just what they can't do. Also, I want to give students' 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 contribution to the group project. The portfolio will include work from all phases of the writing project.
Rubric Ideas
I will use rubrics that I have created to assess each step of the process, and I will assess students' final compositions using the writing rubric developed by the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, available in PDF format at: http://www.nwrel.org/eval/pdfs/6plus1traits.pdf
Student-Teacher Conferences
I will conference with each team of students to discuss their final products and collaboration processes. For example, were there other ideas that had been discussed that eventually were not included as part of the final product? How did they make these decisions? If they were starting over right now, would they do anything differently?
Dialog Journals
Each student will reflect on what he/she enjoyed most about working on the project, and about what was most difficult. These reflections can become part of the portfolios.
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