Year 2 Practicum
Grade 4/5 Class Profile
One of my first tasks when I started my practicum this year was creating a survey that each student in my afternoon grade 4/5 would take with me. This survey was the basis of my class profile that I created. This class profile, along with the early relationships I had started to build with the class, helped give me a clear idea of how I was going to move forward with my planning. I got a sense of what the favorite subjects were in the room as well as some ways that students learn best. I also used this class profile to organize my thoughts about I can best apply the UDL framework and differentiation based on what I had learned about my students.
Create a Machine Cross-Curricular Task
This activity required the students to put two different hats on! First their engineering hat, then their entrepreneurial hat. The first part of this activity started after I introduced our new science unit, Simple Machines. Their task was to identify a problem, and with their group design a machine that could be used to alleviate this problem. This was the engineering stage. I also wanted to find a way to incorporate our language unit we were working on at the time which was persuasive writing. After a few classes of designing machines, they were then tasked to justify their machine in the form of a sales pitch. This is the entrepreneurial side. Students used both science terminology they had learned, along with persuasive writing techniques to convince myself and the rest of the class why their machine is a necessity to make our lives easier.
Gingerbread House Descriptive Story
With our descriptive writing unit coming to a close right around Christmas time, what better way to wrap it up than with a cross-curricular art and language festive assignment! Students were tasked with drawing and then painting a gingerbread house of their creation. They were given the writing prompt in advance to give them some inspiration for their drawing. After the drawing and painting were finished, students got to work writing a story about their gingerbread houses using the descriptive writing strategies that we had been working on.
