Reflection to Week 5

This is a reflection to how my teaching the "Unit of Study" assignment went:

My unit of study was picture books that used the alphabet as a base. The book I used to teach my group was "Alphabet Atlas." by Arthur Yorinks.  In this book, each page is a new letter (A,B, C, etc), and that letter represents a different country, starting with the same letter.  On one page is a short paragraph about the country and on the other page there is a picture of the map of the country. I used this book as an example, because I felt like it could connect well to a social studies unit on geography (meaning it went deeper than just learning about the alphabet), and I said this to my group when I started explaining the activity.  The activity I created was to assign each student a letter, and they would have to pick a different country starting with that letter, and write their own mini-paragraph about the country. I would then combine all of the student pages, and create a "Class Alphabet Atlas."  The activity I planned would be more appropriate for upper-elementary students, because it involves a little outside research. I think I did a good job of explaining my activity the members in group, and they all seemed to like the book that I chose.

I liked this assignment because we were actually able to create our own mini-lessons based on picture books. We have been reading about mini-lessons for the past several weeks, so it was a good experience to come up with our own mini-lessons.