Home | Help | Login | Signup         Jennifer Saden Undergraduate Student Tampa Florida United States Education University of South Florida, St. Petersburg                 My Folios Employment Portfolio FEAP Portfolio FEAP Portfolio Education in Turkey Leonardo DiCaprio Professional Development Portfolio My Employment Portfolio My Learning Portfolio FEAP 2011 Portfolio My Resume                 Back to Folio Evidence #1: Integrated Lesson Plan                 Evidence #1: Integrated (Reading/Writing/Social studies) Lesson Plan Taught View File This evidence is an integrated (reading/writing/social studies) lesson plan implemented in my Level II Internship classroom for the course EDE4942. In this lesson, we read a story about a recently freed slave who becomes a cowboy. We used the document camera to then complete a graphic organizer about making inferences. Next, the students close their books and write a retelling of the story as they remember it, trying to include all of the main details.                 Reflection This lesson meets addresses AP#8 in many ways. First of all, the students are asked to tap into their background knowledge about the Civil War to make inferences about this story. The author of the story purposely left main facts out so you would need to use plot clues and your own knowledge to make an inference about the story. The story also incorporated the cowboy’s ability to become one with the horses, and they learned to respect each other. I gave my students a being-there experience by asking them to think about times when they felt a special connection with an animal, or just what kind of animals they love in general. This gave them a real-life connection to the story that this cowboy really cared about these horses. This helped add to effective story comprehension. As we read, I would stop to make sure all students understood the vocabulary being used in the story. This also helped with comprehension. I used different teaching resources to implement this lesson. The students read from their book, as I put a copy of the story on the document camera. I did the graphic organizer with the students on the document camera. The students were assigned to write a retelling on paper. For students who finished early, they were to use the reading program on the computer to do the activity that went along with this story. This way, the students were being exposed to many types of resources in order to have the same information being reinforced. Through all of these different methods being used throughout the lesson, the students are going to comprehend better and obtain more knowledge. Throughout this integrated lesson, the students got to engage in so many different areas of knowledge and information. Integrating subjects into one lesson is a great way to reinforce ideas and obtain enrichment of what they already know. Finding a way to relate this story directly to their real-life situations is also a great way for students to become interested in a story, and also to have better comprehension. If you connect it to their background knowledge, they have a point of reference to pull from, and they can relate to what they are reading better. My students worked very well with the different types of teaching strategies I used. First, they read along silently in their text book as I read aloud from the document camera. Next, they had to work cooperatively as a class with me to complete the graphic organizer and make inferences about the story. Finally, they had a writing exercise where they had to retell the story. This engages higher levels of thinking, as they have to recall specific details about the story in their retelling.