Lesson Plan Essay Sample

Instructional Setting:

The lesson will largely take place outside the classroom where students can interact freely with the wind and conduct experiments.

Your State Core Curriculum/Student Achievement Standard(s):

The lesson plan conforms to New York State Learning Standards concerning Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education. Examples of applicable standards are:

Standard 4: Science

Students comprehend and use scientific theories, principles, and concepts concerning their physical setting.

Standard 7: Interdisciplinary Problem Solving

Students use technological, scientific and mathematical skills in addressing making informed instructions and solving real-life problems (New York State Education Department, 2017).

Lesson Objective(s)

To assist students in describing the term wind

Describe windy weather condition

To enumerate materials that wind can carry and the criterion used in determining the distance that wind will carry an object

Determine different wind strengths; strong and gentle

MATERIALS AND RESOURCES

Instructional Materials

Instructional materials of different weights which include:

Stones

Sand

Cardboard

Tissue

Toothpick

Stone

Cupcake Liner

Kite

Writing materials include cardboard, pens, and books for recording observations. Other laboratory-based tools include scissors, construction paper, and reading materials.

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

The sequence of Instructional Procedures/Activities/Events (provide a description and indicate approximate time for each):

Student Prerequisite Skills/Connections to Previous Learning:

To be successful in this lesson, students need to have pre-requisite knowledge and skills about:

Definition of wind as the air that surrounds them

Seasons and weather

Variation of the wind. Sometimes wine can be intense or can be a gentle breeze

Presentation Procedures for New Information and Modeling:

Presentation Procedures for New Information:

Purpose of the Lesson

The purpose of the lesson is to impart recording and observation skills to pupils about wind, how it moves materials and impacts of different forms of wind on the environment.

Activity 1

The activity that will serve as the anticipatory test is the experiment to test materials and objects that wind can move. Prior knowledge needed is different wind strengths such as gentle and strong. Materials that will facilitate the investigation include:

Cardboard

Tissue

Toothpick

Stone

Cupcake Liner

Kite

The activity is related to previous learning regarding the definition and description of wind and differentiation of concepts such as gentle and strong. Pupils also need prior knowledge of compass directions to know where the wind is blowing from and the direction it will move materials.

Modeling the skill from the activity is demonstrating why wind can carry light objects such as paper and cupcake liner and why it cannot carry heavy materials such as stones. At the end of the lesson should have the comprehension of reason wind can carry fine sand for long distances. Pupils will know that during wind transportation, wind sorts materials basing on their sizes and weight such that the range that objects are carried depends on wind strength and the dimensions of objects. For example, small grains of soil are moved father than stones of larger size. Because of the experiences that children derive from the activity, they create meaning from them and thus learning is considered to have occurred according to constructivist theory (Ertmer & Newby, 2010).

Guided Practice

With the guidance of the teacher, students will categorize materials that wind moved and differentiated them from those that it did not. In groups of three, students will try to explain why objects in their groups were moved and why others were not. They will identify objects that were moved the farthest. Some aspects make the activity conform to the traditional constructivism classroom. First, it is interactive and has the primary purpose of capitalizing on what pupils already understand. In constructivism theory perspective, the role of the teacher is interactive with the basis of negotiation (Ertmer & Newby, 2010).

Independent Student Practice

As cognitivism theory suggests, interactions among pupils enhance learning and overall achievement since it leads to intensive information processing (Belford, 2013). By discussing among each in the absence of the teachers improve cognitive restructuring because student to student elaboration about the activity contributes to deep conceptual understanding. Students will have charts carrying names of objects available within the environment, test and record whether the wind can take them or not. Students will have the comprehension of why wind fly a kite up in the sky. Students will have a homemade kite to operate on their own. The sample activity chart is:

Object Did the wind move it? (Yes or No) What was the result?

Example: Leaf Yes It moved

Table 1: Assessment Sample

There will be an assessment of the results of the experiment to ascertain whether students understood the practical lesson and whether they can make an inference from the kite practice.

Culminating or Closing Procedure/Activity/Event:

The closing procedure will be the book talk occurring in the classroom in which students will share information they learn from the field and compare with what is in the learning books. Some of the questions which will stimulate the discussion include:

How are the objects in the book and reality similar?

How are the materials in study books different?

Why did the wind move some objects and not others?

What would happen in wind speed and strength increases?

The teacher will record the responses to the answers in a chart paper to facilitate assessment procedure.

Instructional Strategy (or Strategies):

The pedagogical strategy will differ depending on instruction venue. While in class, the instructional approach will be direct instruction. However, during the practical instructional procedure will be experimental and independent to promote student-centered learning and encourage decision-making abilities (Belford, 2013). From the cognitivism theory, the practical lesson the capability of wind to move some objects farther than others endows children with the ability to develop intellectually and form a hypothesis that enables them to discern heavy and light materials. The activity, in cognitivism perspective, tests the children's intelligence, problem-solving skills, memory, and learning (Feldman, 2010).

Differentiated Instruction Accommodations:

Visual learning the use of PowerPoint will be beneficial to students with hearing problems. Those with physical disabilities will access the school field where the experiment will take place using their wheelchairs. Simple English will be used to accommodate English Language Learners.

Use of Technology

Relevant technology which will enhance and supplement learning include:

PowerPoint

3D and 2D animations

Photos, video, audio and written content propagated on a digital screen

Student Assessment/Rubrics:

According to Ertmer and Newby (2010), product and process have equal importance in constructivism theory, some of the strategies for evaluating the learning process include teacher's observation, tests and analysis of students work to ascertain whether they correlate with the contents in the learning materials. Using Assessment tool such as Table 1, the teacher will evaluate the students' responses to ascertain the level of knowledge retention. The lesson is successful if students categorize materials that the wind can carry without assistance from the teacher.

The children under focus 2nd Grade Kindergarten pupils with autistic special needs. Therefore, the lesson plan should support an instructional process which moves the autistic pupils towards a robust understanding progressively and eventually gains independence in learning. Through the application of operant conditioning, the instruction process will modify the children's behavior using positive reinforcement.

Incorporating Cognitivism Structuring in the Lesson Plan

Vygotsky's theory of cognitivism states that different discourse forms, language, and words mediate cognitive skills and facilitates the transformation of mental activities (Yilmaz, 2011). The lesson plan restructuring will entail the inclusion of explanatory questioning. The aim of explanatory questioning is encouraging students to ask questions about the activity at hand thus increasing chances of sustained learning. The change in the lesson will be the incorporation of self-explanation and elaborative interrogation. The inclusion of self-explanation entails giving spaces and chances of integrating unfamiliar information with prior or existing knowledge. Both self-explanation and elaborative interrogation relates to Vygotsky's proposal on the role of internal speech on learning thus opposing Piaget's emphasis on peer interaction. According to Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, and Willingham (2013), self-exploration beseeches metacognitive questioning to assist pupils in making personal connections to the activity at hand. On the other hand, elaborative interrogation assist pupils in exploring the reasons certain information are true or appear in a certain manner. The spaces that explanatory questioning provide are those which students use their thinking to ask themselves the "why" questions which are essential in incorporating existing information, topics and concepts into existing knowledge. Elaborative interrogation, for instance, invokes students' metacognition to think about the difference and similarities between concepts. For example, the lesson plan consists of different materials for testing why and how wind move things such that by the children knowing why wind moves heavy materials a shorter distance compared to the lighter items, they develop an inner understanding of the difference between heavy and light objects. Upon restructuring the lesson to have explanatory breaks between the lessons and practical sessions, students will have the chances to self-explain:

Parts of the lesson or practices that are new to them

Different concepts such as light and heavy mean

The things they don't understand

Explanatory questioning as part of the learning incorporated cognitivism through the principles of perception and attention which mediates bottom-up encoding of information from experiences. Elaborative interrogation invokes perception as it hastens the interpretation of terms and things that students see through their senses. Perception entails conscious perception, top-down and bottom-up processing, object recognition and pattern recognition. Self-explanation focusses on attention which a cognitivism theory that stresses the concentration of one most important thing.

The effectiveness of incorporating cognitivism principles

Cognitive strategies incorporated such as self-explanation and elaborative interrogation enhance efficiency with which students approach learning tasks. In the lesson on wind moving materials, academic tasks include recognizing and classifying objects, applying and remembering concepts from the course. Secondly, cognitive strategies assist learners as they develop internal learning processes and procedures that enable them to comprehend complex tasks. One of the most important areas that utilize cognitive strategies is reading comprehension in which students use self-questioning techniques in understanding what they learn. According to Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nat...