That Unit Wasn't So Bad, Was It?

-
I have put the finishing touches on my unit and am ready to turn it in. As an elementary educator I am used to writing lessons cross curricula so that was not the difficult part. I have not ever had to take one TEK and try to match it to 3 other content areas (other than the writing process). I chose a TEK that involved media literacy and how it is used, conveyed, etc. I chose Home Ec (do they still have this class), Fine Arts, and Social Studies to make this unit. It was actually pretty easy and I found it fun to try and make the content meaningful to the students. For Home Ec they had to create a menu that conveyed what their recipes were going to be as well as a commercial for their eatery. They also had to come up with a name and a logo. Fine Arts was assigned the task of an ad agency who's client was difficult and wanted an ad for their eatery but only gave the agency a name and menu. Students had to create 3 ads that the eatery could choose from. Social studies was easy as well, I had them look at political cartoons, polls, websites, etc. to determine what was trying to be conveyed, how it made them feel, did it change their mind. In ELA we took the same political info. and they researched legal rights then applied it to gossip type magazines of people they were interested in for example can STAR report actor A wrecked his car if he did not.

My goal overall in this was obviously to make sure students learned the content, but more importantly I wanted them to better understand media literacy, how it can make you feel, purchase and believe things. This knowledge goes way beyond the classroom.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hmmmm, Is it procrastination when you just don't know where to start?

-
I am not really anywhere on my project yet, hey it's the truth! I think I have decided on my ELA TEKS, for 6th grade and they include the writing process and evaluating different forms of media and messages. I am thinking I may use History, Art and Home Ec. as the other areas. I think my main assignment for home ec. will be for students to create a restaurant, create a menu, and make different types of advertisements for their eatery including print and video (they will choose how they want to go with menus and advertisements ie. healthy, quick, cheap etc) other students will evaluate the different forms of the messages (maybe what worked, what didn't, could you use the colon or fiber and still get customers?) For history I am thinking of having them view parts of the State of The Union Address vs. President on Late night t.v. to compare and contrast formal and informal. For art they will view/create art from different decades while trying to determine what was trying to be con
Read more

To assess or not to assess is NOT the question

-
When I think of assessment I immediately think of assessing a situation and to me that means taking into account the whole situation and trying to form some type of opinion and make a plan from that information. If I apply that same thought to the classroom, here is what I come up with; sometimes when we assess it can be targeted like a certain skill or piece of information but it can also be very broad like assessing the student as a whole. In order to be successful educators we will have to do both, targeted assessment and whole assessment. I am EC-6 th so I will have to assess my students in all areas. One of my favorite forms of authentic assessment is conferencing with a student to see what they know about what we just learned and if they got the important parts. Another form of authentic assessment I plan to use is journaling. A science journal is different than a science notebook. It is less formal and students can ask questions in there, formulate hypothesis and students go ba
Read more