The plan is broken down for a reading block of 135 minutes. Being a triad, I have 90 minutes with each class per day, so my daily lesson planning cuts the unit plan down for the most impactful components. The unit plan is based up Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills/ Student Expectations. The required skills of focus for the unit are mentioned up front. They are broken down further into Strands for more deliberate grouping of standards.

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Accommodations for Special Needs Learners and English Learners are included as well.

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Unit Assessments are attached to the Unit Planning Guides. Teacher and students track data from these tests. The questioning in this assessment is aligned to daily classwork. Questions include context clues (prefix work), character interactions, inferencing, and drawing conclusions about the changes characters undergo. 

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Unit Read Aloud is pre-selected and provided to the teacher. For this particular unit we utilized, Patricia Pollaco's text, The Junkyard Wonders. Through this realistic fiction text, we explored literary elements such as: setting, plot, character development and the changes they undergo, character interaction, sequence, and summary.

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Mini-Lesson content is provided through links attached to the Unit Planning Guide.

It is intuitive and user friendly for teachers to navigate. Lessons provide defintions and explicit scripts for teachers to disseminate content.

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Word Study block is solely given the skill. It is up to the educator to choose the activity to explain the skill. For this particular week we looked at small excerpts and determined the meaning of unknown words with the prefix un-. This is the most flexible portion of the unit planning guide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

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        Based upon reflection after implementation of this unit, I have three major takeaways for future planning. First, combining provided lessons saves time for instructional time lost. In this case it was due to policy and procedure practice. In the future, it will be due to field trips and assessment. Also, allocating increased learning time for complicated topics is necessary to help students reach mastery. Finally, utilizing bookmarks is a useful strategy for take-home content. I can provide students content from anchor charts in simple bookmark format.

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       Unit Plans provide more specific vision for what day to day in the classroom looks like per grouping of standard and in my case, genre. By logically creating a Unit Plan, all necessary skills are covered and students can reach mastery in grade-level content. 

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