As of today my Kenan Fellow peers have individually completed AT LEAST 30 hours of curriculum building. The lessons seem to range in subject areas, grades, and STEM approaches. I personally have created three lesson plans over the past three weeks. It is pretty amazing how much the human mind can gather when it is time to produce polished products to add to resources libraries. All of my lessons were a stretch for me as I am a math teacher and I wanted to make sure I did not lose my subject area while planning.
Lesson one will focus on the one health initiative and the heat exposure on the human body. Students are to plan a family picnic and decide which location will give family members a “cooler” experience. Students are in charge of using the TI Sensortag to collect different heat and sun reading in the surrounding areas of their school building. Once the data is collected, a presentation on the best picnic location is presented to the class.
Lesson two will focus on the engineering design process in math. Students will use the LittleBits circuits to test the pressure needed to activate an output module. Students will use quarters and half dollars to create the pressure needed to activate the buzzer, fan, bargraph, and vibrator modules. Students are tying in math with exploring proportions and ratios of weights of quarters and half dollars.
The third lesson was an energy harvesting presentation. Super Solar Recycle is an excellent way to have students pick up the empty water bottle or soda can. Solar Robots are using the recyclables to entertain children of all sizes.
In theory, the lessons were exciting to create BUT once my fingers hit the keyboard, time and patience sat in for long hours of planning. Some successes of the lesson writing experience comes from the lessons I have access to once my fellows are all published. The most amazing success from lesson planning was using the TI Sensortag and LittleBits circuits. The only obstacle of presenting my lessons will be getting enough of the Sensortags and LittleBits to conduct the lesson. As long as I have 8 of each which will allow my students to work in groups. The only and BIGGEST challenge I found from lesson planning was my inability to make my lessons as rigorous as I wanted and having enough time to gather my thoughts and get them into the template. In all, I am done with my drafts and now the fun time of the chop and edits can begin!