Early Childhood Special Education

This is the lesson plan outline you will follow for the lesson for this class.

Step 1: Desired Results (Learning Central Focus)

A. Standards:

· This is will be specific standard from your unit plan outline which this lesson targets.

· Remember that if this needs to match the content area. (Math lesson-math standard).

· Put the words for the standard and the url.

B. Objectives:

· Must be clear, specific and measurable.

· The statement that begins this section is, “At the end of this lesson, the child (student) will be able to…”

· One or two objectives are age appropriate. No more than 3 are appropriate for the age groups we work with.

· These should be listed as outcomes.

· Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to write these objectives.

· All of your lesson objs need to also be listed in your unit plan.

· Without clear objectives, your lesson will not be effective.

· Be sure that your objectives are the main concepts or skills you want to teach. You may teach other skills/concepts, but only the ones listed under objectives get assessed.

· Be sure that as you write your lesson, you make certain that you are actually teaching your objective and then assessing that objective. This is the hardest part of a lesson-having that clarity throughout the lesson.

· Be sure you list objectives as what students are learning, not how they are learning. For example, coloring a picture. Unless you are teaching the skill of coloring, the coloring is used to teach something else. So your obj should not be “At the end of the lesson, the child will be able to color a picture of farm animals.” It should be, “At the end of the lesson, the child will be able to identify 5 farm animals.” See the difference?

Step 2: Learning Plan: Instructional Strategies and Learning Tasks

Materials:

· List the materials the students will need.

· List the materials the teacher will need.

· All these materials need to also be listed in the unit plan.

Vocabulary and Concepts:

· List the vocabulary that need to be taught in this lesson.

· List the concepts that need to be taught in this lesson.

· All of these should also be listed in the unit plan.

Introduction:

· There is no actual teaching in the introduction. Anything that is teaching your objectives has to go in procedures, so be sure when introducing the lesson, it is not actually teaching your objectives.

· This is a short part of the lesson. The primary part of the lesson is the procedures. That is where the bulk of your time should go.

· The introduction should only be from a few minutes to no more than 10 for older children and/or several objectives.

· Teacher Role: What will you as the teacher do? How will you review concepts/vocabulary? How will you call on children? How will you seat children? What questions will you ask?

· Student Role: What are students doing? This needs to be active. Do NOT say,” Children are sitting and listening” unless you add to this-what ELSE are they doing??

· Engagement/Active Learning: How are students engaged in the learning here? This means they need to be actively engaged! Provide a motivating, short activity for introducing the concept.

· Differentiation: How are you ensuring that all students are engaged and learning? What will you do if some students need extra assistance?

· Pre-Assessment (Prior Student Knowledge): If this is new concept, how will you assess if they have any prior knowledge of it? If this is a continuation, how will you review their prior knowledge?

· Setting the Purpose for the lesson: State the purpose of the lesson to the children.

· You do not have to use the exact words of the objective with the children. For example, you don’t have to say, “Today we will differentiate between primary and secondary colors.” You can say, “Today we will learn how primary and secondary colors are different.”

· Without stating the purpose to the lesson to the children, we do not provide them with a way to understand what they are doing or learning.

· When children go home and are asked, “What did you do today?” their response should not be “We played a game.” It should be “We played a game on the color blue.” See the difference?

Procedures:

· The main part of your lesson.

· This is the activity part of your lesson

· This is where all teaching takes place.

· Provide detailed steps and directions for each part.

· This is where you teach the concepts through hands on activities.

· Assessment will take place throughout the activity. This is called formative assessment or checking for understanding.

I Do (Modeling/Instruction):

· This is the part of the lesson where you are teaching and modeling the skill and concept to the students.

· ALL teaching is done here. Introduction introduces the lesson, but does not teach. Closure is about review and assessment. No teaching should take place there.

· Be sure you are actually teaching each objective. For example coloring a picture does not teach about farm animals. You must have somewhere where you TEACH about farm animals and then the coloring activity is reinforcement for your teaching

· Teacher Role: What will you as the teacher do? How will you teach and model the objective? How will you call on children? What questions will you ask? What examples of the concept/skill will you use here? How will you teach them how to do the skill or understand the concept?

· Student Role: What are students doing? This needs to be active. Although the teacher is instructing, this needs to involve the children.

· Engagement/Active Learning: How are students engaged in the learning here? This means they need to be actively engaged!

· Differentiation: How are you ensuring that all students are engaged and learning? What will you do if some students need extra assistance?

· Formative Assessment (Checking for Understanding): How will you know students are understanding what you have taught? What will you do here to check their understanding?

· Formative assessment means that you are assessing the lesson as you go. For example if you are teaching a math skill and the children do not seem to be getting it, you will change what you do. You may use easier problems, review prior skills, use more examples, or stop the lesson and regroup for the next day.

· Formative assessment is very important to having an effective lesson.

We Do: Guided Practice:

· This is where you will have the children practice the skill or concept.

· This is usually done as a group (hence the we do part because you are doing it with them or this can also be done in pairs or small groups with frequent coming back to the group for checking.

· Here you want to guide the students through examples with lots of feedback from you and lots of opportunities as a group to practice and discuss the skill/concept.

· You need to do enough examples and practice here to ensure the children understand the concept

· Teacher Role: What will you as the teacher do? How will you have the children practice the objective (concept/skill)? How will you call on children? What questions will you ask? What practice examples of the concept/skill will you use here?

· Student Role: What are students doing? This needs to be active and students need to be active participants in the learning/practicing.

· Engagement/Active Learning: How are students engaged in the learning here? This means they need to be actively engaged!

· Differentiation: How are you ensuring that all students are engaged and learning? What will you do if some students need extra assistance?

· Formative Assessment (Checking for Understanding): How will you know students are understanding what you have taught? What will you do here to check their understanding?

You Do: Independent Practice:

· This is where the children practice the skills on their own (independently). For young children (even up to 3rd grade) this can be in pairs, not independently. But it is with less guidance from the teacher than in We Do

· Teacher Role: What will you as the teacher do? How will you have the children practice the objective (concept/skill) with less guidance than in We Do? How will you call on children? What questions will you ask? What practice examples of the concept/skill will you use here?

· Student Role: What are students doing? This needs to be active and students need to be active participants in the learning/practicing.

· Engagement/Active Learning: How are students engaged in the learning here? This means they need to be actively engaged!

· Differentiation: How are you ensuring that all students are engaged and learning? What will you do if some students need extra assistance?

· Formative Assessment (Checking for Understanding): How will you know students are understanding what you have taught? What will you do here to check their understanding?

Closure:

Review:

· Review what was learned by asking “What did we learn today?”

· What else will you ask here?

· What concepts and vocab do you want them to say here?

· How are ALL students involved in the review so you can assess mastery of the concept/skill/obj?

· Review is important to be sure children leave with the purpose and skills of the lesson.

· Don’t tell the children what they learned. We know YOU know what was suppose to be learned. Telling them what they learned is only a review for you, not them.

· The trick is to find out if the children learned it. Make sure students tell you what they learned and you fill in the blanks. If, when you ask, “What did we learn today?” they say we played a game, you can say, “About what?” and steer the discussion toward the concepts you want them to remember.

Assessment:

· Summative assessment takes place.

· Assessment can be oral or written, but ALL students must be

assessed.

· Try to use All Call Response methods here for quick assessment

· Each objective must be reviewed and assessed.

· Tie lesson into what is happening the next day.

· Homework can be assigned here.

· When assessing students, you will not have the time, nor will children sit quietly while you individually ask each child questions for assessment.

· So, therefore, using something called “all call response” such as Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down is a way of quickly assessing all students at the same time. Other ways might be to have students all hold up the finished product from the procedure (let’s say a worksheet where all the appropriate items were colored red). At a quick glance you can see who colored in the wrong items (apple is red, elephant should not be red, etc.). Another method of quick assessment is using the small dry erase boards (almost all ele schools use these). You can give a problem on the board “list a noun”, or “2+2= X” and have each child do the work on the dry erase board, hold it up, and you can see who has mastered the skill.

· Be sure each objective and each child is assessed.

· Giving homework is not summative assessment. That is done at home, not where the teacher can assess it. Likewise, a test is not summative assessment unless it is gone over in class prior to the end of the lesson.

· This is also true of assessments such as collecting papers at the end of the lesson to grade overnight, exit cards, etc. While these are assessments they are not summative assessments done at the end of the lesson to ensure student mastery of the objective.