This week we discussed ELA standards and explored the different standards for different school levels. I decided to explore the 11th and 12th grade standards further since that would hopefully be the classes I would teach if I were to decide to follow this career path. Overall, the standards seem familiar, which is to be expected since I was in classes that utilized these standards less than two years ago. I would say I feel most prepared to teach students the skills to meet standard LAFS.1112.W.1.2, which focuses on writing informative texts to discuss complex ideas, essentially. I feel most prepared to teach this standard because I spent most of my time during my Junior and Senior year of high school learning how to write scripts for and produce a daily news show. The reason this really helped prepare me to teach this standard is the fact that producing a daily broadcast that does not eat into the school's class time requires me to pick and choose exactly what information is essential and how to organize it in a way that keeps the audience engaged and informed about what is happening around school. I think the standard I am least prepared to teach is LAFS.1112.WHST.3.8, which deals with learning to not overuse one particular source. I have noticed in my more recent English classes that if I had a topic that was fairly easy, I could find one source that has the same argument and I don't see the need to pull from other sources(which is far from the truth) but also for harder topics, it is more difficult to find more than one source with the information you need to back up your argument.
One resource I found on CPALMS, which is this HUGE database of teaching resources that relate to the ELA and Common Core standards, is a lesson for an 11th or 12th grade English class. The lesson plan involves analyzing three pieces to reveal the importance of the life cycle as a universal theme. I would use this lesson plan, however, to meet the standard LAFS.1112.RL.1.2, which is about identifying two or more themes or central ideas in a text and analyze their development throughout the text. I always found the questions on the SAT that asked what you think the central idea of the provided text infuriating. That was always the section of the ELA portion of the SAT, or any assessment that included that type of question, that I struggled with. I feel that analyzing these texts and finding more than just one generalized theme for the story would help students that struggle in the same way as well as strengthen the skills of the students who can do so with little to no issue. Acknowledging the fact that there can be multiple lessons in a story is so important and being able to determine which is considered the main theme of the story is even more essential.
This week, we also discussed the creation of a newsletter and created one ourselves using Microsoft Word. One skill in Word that I learned from this assignment along with the skill check is using page breaks. I used to always get quite frustrated when working with word for something other than just an academic paper because the text wouldn't go where I wanted it. Learning about using breaks changed. my. world. I used to always just kind of cheat and use 500 textboxes but now that I understand how much those page breaks help you control the layout of your page, I might have to go into some document design work. Overall, I really like how my newsletter turned out, however, I wish I had better content to put into it! I feel like the fact that I chose a 2nd grade class somewhat prevented me from having better information in it since I haven't been in a second grade class in 12-ish years. I think the header is my favorite part of the entire newsletter. I feel like every school newsletter I got in elementary school had a cute little graphic of a schoolhouse that didn't look anything like our actual school on it and I had to stick with that image. While I looked through images of schoolhouses licensed under Creative Commons, I couldn't really find one that I really liked, so, I found one I kind of liked and added some things to make it even better. I think the skills I learned from this assignment will help me design my own résumé that is easy to edit and visually pleasing.
One resource I found on CPALMS, which is this HUGE database of teaching resources that relate to the ELA and Common Core standards, is a lesson for an 11th or 12th grade English class. The lesson plan involves analyzing three pieces to reveal the importance of the life cycle as a universal theme. I would use this lesson plan, however, to meet the standard LAFS.1112.RL.1.2, which is about identifying two or more themes or central ideas in a text and analyze their development throughout the text. I always found the questions on the SAT that asked what you think the central idea of the provided text infuriating. That was always the section of the ELA portion of the SAT, or any assessment that included that type of question, that I struggled with. I feel that analyzing these texts and finding more than just one generalized theme for the story would help students that struggle in the same way as well as strengthen the skills of the students who can do so with little to no issue. Acknowledging the fact that there can be multiple lessons in a story is so important and being able to determine which is considered the main theme of the story is even more essential.
This week, we also discussed the creation of a newsletter and created one ourselves using Microsoft Word. One skill in Word that I learned from this assignment along with the skill check is using page breaks. I used to always get quite frustrated when working with word for something other than just an academic paper because the text wouldn't go where I wanted it. Learning about using breaks changed. my. world. I used to always just kind of cheat and use 500 textboxes but now that I understand how much those page breaks help you control the layout of your page, I might have to go into some document design work. Overall, I really like how my newsletter turned out, however, I wish I had better content to put into it! I feel like the fact that I chose a 2nd grade class somewhat prevented me from having better information in it since I haven't been in a second grade class in 12-ish years. I think the header is my favorite part of the entire newsletter. I feel like every school newsletter I got in elementary school had a cute little graphic of a schoolhouse that didn't look anything like our actual school on it and I had to stick with that image. While I looked through images of schoolhouses licensed under Creative Commons, I couldn't really find one that I really liked, so, I found one I kind of liked and added some things to make it even better. I think the skills I learned from this assignment will help me design my own résumé that is easy to edit and visually pleasing.
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