Lesson Planning Practices At The ECI/573 Class

On Tuesday, January 19th, our ECI 573 class went down to the College of Education computer lab to work on our baseline lesson plan, the first lesson plan assignment of the term. This assignment was completed individually and meant to serve as a pre-assessment for Dr. Ross to gauge each student’s current understanding of lesson planning practices. The assignment was to write a lesson plan for the grade of our choice, using a standard from the Measurement and Data domain from the Arizona Department of Education K-12 Academic Standards. This assignment was completed over approximately an hour, between 4:30 and 5:30 pm, and turned in via BbLearn before the end of class. We were given free range to utilize the Internet to find existing lesson plans

I then decided to create a lesson to introduce students to the metric system and simple conversion between units. Once this decision was made, I reviewed a few lesson plans I found online to get an idea of how other teachers approached the subject and began writing. I decided to begin with the story of King Henry and his chocolate milk to help students remember the mnemonic device for the metric units. I then laid out an activity meant to help further solidify students’ memorization of the different units and their relationships. The remainder of the lesson was mostly focused on converting between units, starting with modeling it for the class then having the students work in pairs to practice their skills and ending with table groups comparing their answers and reviewing as a whole class. The closure for the lesson is an activity to further help students remember the units and their relationships by having them place them in the correct

By focusing first on identifying the desired outcome then building the lesson to support it, teachers are able to make sure that all the instruction and activities used during a given lesson are working cohesively towards a single goal. With math, it is also important to have a clear understanding of the students’ previous experience and knowledge, since it is constantly building on itself. When creating this lesson plan, I tried to think through necessary information for students to be familiar and comfortable with to succeed so the lesson would be accessible and understandable. The Internet provides a huge number of lessons and activities that can be used in the classroom, so many that it’s almost overwhelming. To wade through the options, I try to focus in on what I want to teach before I even begin researching online, that provides limitations on what I’m looking for and allows me to find the best information possible to support my lesson. Once I gathered ideas for activities and ways to structure the lesson, it was just a matter of putting the pieces together. Since I approached it in a methodical way, with the standard and objectives in mind, creating a lesson plan aimed at introducing students to converting between units of measurement was a fairly smooth and successful