What do I want my students to know and do at the end of a unitWhat

When looking at my unit lesson plans so far to some it may seem quiet easy to teach kindergarten students how to write and the functions of writing. But to me I’m finding that it may be difficult. Not difficult as in oh my goodness I’m going to have a terrible time and be a terrible teacher but more from the stand point that for kindergarten age I need to make my lesson plans fun and engaging or the students will get bored out of their mind and we all know what happens when a student is bored at that age. They start to talk, and wander around the room and just blatantly not pay attention. So for my unit I am going over English Language Arts at the kindergarten level learning the structures of sentence writing. For this I want the students to know the importance of using capital letters and different punctuation marks for different phrases such as a period for a regular sentence and exclamation mark of the sentence they are writing they want the reader to know they are excited about and the question mark if the sentence is asking a question. What I want the students to do is to write out sentences that come to their mind or that follow a picture to help pick their brains on what to write. I will assess their growth by using the stories I ask them to write, this will also be a peer review type of thing because I want my students to learn as much as they can from each other because I feel that is the best way to learn!

Lesson Plan thoughts from group 1

The lesson plans that were presented in class were a HUGE help! Before the presentations I was literally freaking out because I wasn't sure where to even start with beginning my lesson plans. I know this is all a learning experience but I like to do things right the first time and presenting in class makes me nervous because I don't want to mess up. Everyone who presented had such a wide array of topics that it was really interesting. I really enjoyed Ali's presentation about recycling because this is something that we need to work on, who knew you could make things out of a recycled bottle such as planters. That was really interesting!

Difference between Formative assessment and performance based assessment

When we were in class we were going over different assessments that we may use with our students to make sure they are understanding what we are teaching. In class Dr. Steffes asked us to demonstrate a performance assessment which is and assessment that we use throughout the lesson to understand where our students are clicking at and then recognizing the ones that may need a little bit of our help. Formative assessment to me is the assessment we perform at the end of our lesson such as a test.

~Example 1 will be over performance based assessment:  When teaching the alphabet to a group of students I want to know how many are understanding the example pictures I am showing them with the letter A. So I will print off a worksheet that shows each student the exact pictures that I would show while the class would do it together. I will then ask the students to color in the pictures that start with the letter A as I read them aloud to the class. After the classwork is complete I will then look at the worksheets and see which students are understanding versus which students need a little extra help.

Example 2 over formative based assessment: After we have gone over every letter and the students have completed their worksheets at the end of the unit I will take each student individually back to a table. At this time I will have a paper that shows the letters and pictures we went over I will ask the student to match which picture goes with which letter. This will give me an understanding of how each student interpreted the lesson.