I always knew that at one point, or several, in my graduate program I would have to create lesson plans. Yet, until this moment I haven’t had to. I’ve come up with activities to do with certain grade levels or a certain type of reading activity. Thinking of a unit and the lessons that go with it was something that I wasn’t really prepared to do. Usually I just take something that I like and create something that fits the criteria for that assignment. But, this time I have to pick a unit that I might end up teaching my future students and plan lessons that go with it.

I really thought about what grade level I wanted to teach at and what unit I could cover that would be fun for the students but what also covers the Common Core Standards. I choose to do Multicultural Literature for High School (11th-12th grade), mainly because I feel that there is so much we can learn about other cultures from different forms of literature, as well as the language used. Coming up with tasks was the easy part but finding and figuring out which Common Core Standard fits with each task gave me a headache. The hard was seeing how you can defend the task to the Standard, but that’s what you have to do. The ISTE-S standards were easier to fit to the tasks.

In coming up with these tasks I really thought about what I did in High School and what I thought worked really well and just added the technology aspect of it. One activity I have, I seek some help with the instructional part of it and found that Bright Hub Education was really helpful. They have lessons planned out and they give you room to make changes and adapted it to your class. They have some for any subject, such as Shakespeare and making it modern. The site that was helpful and something I would use to show my students an example was the Poetry Foundation website. They have a section of podcasts where they talk about poems and I feel that it would be good to show students what exactly I want them to do.

Using the STAIRS template for lesson planning was really helpful, since I have no experiences in doing them. It really helped me focus on one section at a time and made sure that I fully understood all the different parts that were needed in end step. I’m sure for future classes I will use this, unless given a certain one to use.

Lessoning planning may not sound fun and at first it really isn’t but when you get down to the thinking of the tasks and the instruction you can’t help but feel that you want to do these tasks as well!