BME Project

Brenda Burnell and I met on Friday, March 6th to create the stage 1 template for our second unit goal. Under our English Language Arts curriculum we have a goal numbered 2.4.1. This goal reads “Students will select a focus for writing and develop an idea, including a beginning, middle, and end.”

To help explain the process, I showed Brenda my completed stage one template. Using a number of other resources (1. the notes I had taken on establishing essential questions from our book, 2. the knowledge and skills sample sheet, 3. the verb list from page 161, and 4. the design checklist for stage one), I gave her an overview of the process I took to complete my template. We started talking about what we wanted our students to understand about our goal. We also discussed how our lesson(s) would impact our students in their regular classroom and in life outside the school. We began to throwing around ideas about using Reading Rainbow to get students excited about writing. (Reading Rainbow use to have a writing contest. You can still go onto the web sight and read the winning digital story books posted for each grade level). As we talked, we jotting down ideas about what we wanted our students to understand and what essential questions were key to best meeting these objectives. Using the “knowledge and skills sample” sheet we circled a few key words on what we wanted students to know. We also circled the skills that we felt would best meet our goals and used the verb list to help form these ideas. Finally we plugged it all into the template.

Brenda was amazed at the thinking behind this process. She felt that, although time consuming, it gets teachers thinking about our lessons as life long ones, rather than just the teaching of facts. Since she has had experience with Comic Life she was excited about the final project for our first goal, and wondered how we could use this or another type 2 technology (possibly a digital story book) to get our students writing for a bigger audience and purpose.

We left feeling excited, and I left with a few questions. Is our “big project” suppose to measure just one goal, or measure all the goals being integrated? My big project was to retell a story using comic life, hers was to write and publish (possibly) for the Reading Rainbow contest. Part of hers lessons will definitely include writing for their comic strips, while much of hers will have to do with writing well written pieces for an authentic audience.