During this placement, I became the most familiar with the grade 2 curriculum, despite being placed in a split grade classroom of 2 & 3. My cooperating teacher was focusing on, in this semester, outcomes from the grade 2 curriculum in the subjects that I ended up planning lessons for.
I typically planned my lessons and student activities around an outcome that my cooperating teacher was working on or wanting to introduce. I felt that this was the best way for me to plan my lessons because it then guaranteed that whatever activity or lesson I taught was relevant and effective in teaching towards an outcome. It also, I felt, informed the way that I verbalized and passed the information and important points of the outcome to the students. I found that having worked so extensively on finding activities that fit my outcome, rather than the other way around, ensured that I was using proper language and also made my lessons more focused.
In my Friendly Letter Writing Lesson, I used the curriculum to help teach myself the proper language and components of a letter, which in turn also made my lesson run more smoothly. In that instance, I chose my outcome, chose some of the indicators that I thought would be beneficial to use or that would help build an interesting lesson and activity, and from those I began to plan exactly what I would do to introduce the concept and as an activity. I found that the indicators also lent themselves to the questioning I did in class. Many of the questions I used to gauge the student’s prior knowledge were adapted from the indicators I had chosen, and I also used some of those questions later on to have students review and recap what they learned.
Overall, I feel that throughout this placement I learned an effective way to use the curriculum to inform and shape my lesson plans. Rather than doing extra work to make the outcomes fit an activity I planned, I was able to use the outcomes to shape and develop a relevant activity.