Last Wednesday and Friday I went to an in-service on Unit Planning. Before I was there, my school required teachers to submit weekly lesson plans to the principals. However, this year they want teachers to write full unit plans with attached lesson plans so that teachers can see the big picture and use the whole unit as a chance to scaffold ideas and build on knowledge.
At the in-service we spent a little time talking about why we unit plan and how we unit plan and then the teachers were given the chance to go back to their classrooms to write lesson plans.
Many teachers voiced in these sessions how hard of a tasks this was to do after so many years of the previous format. While this is no easy task for me, I feel pretty good that this was the exact way APSU wanted us to do our lesson planning.
Working on my unit plan:
The first unit of the year is Informational Text (non-fiction type resources- think magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc). I have decided to teach The Diary of Anne Frank (which is a DIARY a.k.a. an informational text!) and use the Holocaust and WWII has source of inspiration for the informational text part. I am pretty stoked because TDofAF was one of my favorite books growing up.
On the first day of unit planning, I did not get a lot completed. I did manage to look at all the standards for the unit, decide on my summative assessment, and write essential questions for the unit. On Friday I actually got around to writing rough drafts of lessons for the first week.
On the Thursday in between those days I had to spend my entire day - from 7:45 to 4:30- at Central Office to fill out paper work, sign my teaching contract, sign up for insurance and benefits, learn how to use certain teacher computer systems, etc.
It was a really LONG, but really helpful day.
I was the most intrigued with the insurance and benefits portion. So much of it seemed too good to be true that I had to call my mother afterwards to confirm that I heard correctly. I haven't had insurance since I graduated high school, and I have a lot of medical issues that need to be looked at. I felt like someone was handing me gold. For one, I couldn't believe thatI can get ANY generic medicines for free. A doctor just writes me a prescription and I go turn it in and they hand me drugs and I DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR THEM! I can also GET MY TEETH CLEANED and pay NOTHING.
I'm starting to get worked up again......this is pure heaven.
This is the last weekend before school starts. Normally I would have found a way to use this as an excuse to do absolutely nothing, but this weekend is the Nashville 48 Hour Film Project, and we compete each year. It is something that I look forward to every year, so I decided to just add it in to the million other things I need to do this week.
I have in-service all next week, and our first day of school is a half day this Friday. I have very ambitious goals to have my entire 44 day-lesson unit plan done on Thursday and to get my classroom completely ready.
