Week
28: Connecting
the Curriculum to Your Project
Homework
for the Teacher
Keep
Your Curriculum Alive & Aligned with Project Goals
- When project goals are carefully matched to
the instructional needs and interests of your students, and
at the same time aligned with curriculum standards, you have
the tools to build a powerhouse of authentic, engaged student
learning opportunities.
- Why do
children desperately need these cooperative, collaborative,
real-world experiences?
Take
Time to Pause and Reflect
- How do collaborative online project activities
compare to traditional whole group classroom activities?
Things
to consider: What percent of our school day is spent
in attempts to help students master the basics with exercises,
worksheets, lectures, and drills? How often are the basics
applied to issues in the world around them? How often are
students engaged in drawing conclusions, developing persuasive
arguments or comparing the pros and cons?
- Will
this project allow my class to do something they could not
do before today?
- Will
this enable my students to do something they could do before,
but do it better?
- Do
students clearly understand the goals of the project and why
they are doing it? Do you believe they are intrinsically motivated
to take ownership of their learning throughout the project?
- Will
the project include activities that are cross-curricular
and address multiple intelligences and higher order thinking?
More
Ways to Connect the Curriculum
- Match
activities to learning standards with Tammy Payton’s Buddy
Project.
- Now,
find out if those resources pass muster by visiting EvaluTech and
searching their database of reviews!
Reading
Strategy Spotlight
Connect the known to the new. Activate relevant, prior
knowledge before, during, and after reading. Connecting a student's
existing schema to new schema is a vital linking process that
helps to permanently store new information in their long-term
memories.
Student
Activity Sheet
Printable pages designed to complement the current week's
Reading Strategy Spotlight and to help students organize their
thoughts, reflect upon reading material, and look for organizational
patterns in online text.
BBs:
Weekly Nuggets of "Best Practices" and "Brain Research"
What are the real reasons you need to avoid lecturing
most of the day?
TechKnow
Disaster Preparedness Page
Printable Computer Skills Mini-Posters & activity sheets
for those times when the network crashes or equipment is unavailable.
You can print a different page each week.
Fifth
Grade Computer Skills Test Item Bank
Please retain the security of this test to maintain its
validity. Contact your local Media and/or Technology Director
for the user name and password to access the item bank.
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