Lesson Plan Format

Name: Pam Miller Big Idea/Essential Question/Lesson Focus: Characteristics of a good rule Subject: Social Studies Grade/Students Involved: 1-2 Date Written: 9/3/13 Date Taught: 9/4/13 Time Needed for Lesson: 20 minutes Academic Standards: MN State Standard: 1.1.4.8.1: Identify characteristics of effective rules; participate in a process to establish rules. MPS Social Studies Learning Target: 1.1 I can identify characteristics of good rules. Learning Objectives: A. Content: Students will be able to generate a list of class rules and sort them into categories (defined below). B. Academic Language Needs: I can use prepositions such as under, next to, above when sorting rules into categories. Previous Learning: In the previous lessons, students talked about what they hope to learn this year and discussed characteristics of a good rule. Assessment Tools: A. Formal: Nones B. Informal: Unsorted and sorted list of class rules and observations during discussion. Provisions for Individual Differences: I will be reading lists from previous lessons and writing the list of rules. I will also use a few different methods of management and participation such as pair/share, moving around the room, etc. Resources and Materials Needed: Promethean Board, list of hopes and dreams (from previous lesson), list of characteristics of good rules (from previous lesson), index cards of categories Instructional Strategies and Learning Tasks Introduction 1. Display and read the list of what students hope to learn this year and list of characteristics of good rules from previous lessons.

Instruction 2. Ask students to think of rules our class should have. Pair/share. (If students have trouble thinking of rules, prompt them by asking for rules in the hall, playground, other rooms, etc.) 3. Write down rules on white board. Have negative rules restated into positive sentences. 4. After a list has been generated, help students sort the rules into Self, Others, and Place. Write sorted rules using Promethean Board. Post these categories on the walls and have students move to the category that they think rules should be put into. If there is disagreement, have students share their ideas. 5. After rules are sorted, help students think of a way to state a rule that covers all the rules in that category. Closure 6. Tell students that tomorrow well think about a good place to put the rules in the classroom and discuss good ways to follow the rules.

Reflection: A. What is working? What is not, and for whom? Why? Were the students engaged? How do you know? B. How does this reflection inform what you plan to do in the next lesson/s? This lesson was not as successful as the previous one. The students generated a list of about ten different rules, which showed they were thinking about many ways to behave and misbehave in school. The activity of moving around the room to sort the rules into categories did not last as long as I would have hoped. After about three rules, students became disengaged. Several students were moving just to move, or going to other sides of the room because no one else was there. These students were not able to explain why they chose that particular category. I wonder if this would have been a better activity if the students had chosen the categories, instead of have them chosen by me. Also, it was difficult to get the whole class to come up with a general ways to state the rules for each category. I tried to explain what I was looking for in a few different ways (e.g. If we had a new student, how would to explain all these rules in one rule?), but to

no avail. I ended up writing the three general rules for the class, which we will use in the next lesson. Next time, I would like to try to scaffold more to get the children to make general rules. This could be done by modeling how to write a general sentence using several specific ones. I could show real life examples, such as the U.S. Constitution and specific laws and how these are alike and different. If I had done this activity multiple times with a class, I could use the previous years general list of rules and show how the specific rules relate. Then students could decide if they agree or disagree with the general rules and whether or not they want to change them. Another change would be the sorting step. This activity was helpful in leading up to writing general rules. However, it probably would have been better if the students created the categories, not the teacher or curriculum. This way it would have been more meaningful to the students.