UCLA Center X TEP ELEMENTARY UNIT/ LESSON PLANNING COMMENTARY Your Name: Jenna Fishoff Date: February 19,

2014 Unit/Lesson Title: Draft Expository Writing: Persuasive Letter Day 2 Grade Level and Content Area: Second Grade, Language Arts Number of Students: 24 Total Amount of Time: 1 hour 1. Learning Goals/Standards: What concepts, essential questions or key skills will be your focus? What do you want your students to know at the end of this unit/lesson? This is Lesson # 2, out of a four-day lesson segment. The central focus is writing a Persuasive Letter, however at the end of this lesson, students will be successfully completing the first draft of their persuasive letter. Students will have already completed their graphic organizer as well as demonstrate understanding of all key vocabulary words pertaining to this skill. 2. Rationale: Why is this content important for your students to learn and how does it promote social justice? Persuasive writing and opinion pieces have become an important part of second grade curriculum. Persuasive thinking and writing allows students to have a voice and express their opinions in a constructive and effective manner, which will promote personal and social activism as these students grow and navigate through society. 3. Identifying and supporting language needs: What are the language demands of the unit/lesson? How do you plan to support students in meeting their English language development needs (including academic language)? Students will need to be able to show understanding of key vocabulary words such as persuade, argue, opinion, reasons, draft, letter, graphic organizer, etc. I will model academic language and vocabulary words and require EL or lower level literacy students to repeat these words aloud with me. Posters with transition and key words will be posted as well as example of graphic organizer with details for students to model after. 4. Accessing prior knowledge and building upon students backgrounds, interests and needs: How do your choices of instructional strategies, materials and sequence of learning tasks connect with your students backgrounds, interests, and needs? The letter prompt will be relevant to students, as they have all expressed to me that they have wanted some sort of pet that they needed to ask and persuade an elder to let them have. Students will be able to include someone from their personal life as their audience. 5. Accommodations: What accommodations or support will you use for all students (including English Language Learners and students with special educational needs, i.e. GATE students and students with IEPs)? Explain how these features of your learning and assessment tasks will provide all students access to the curriculum, and allow them to demonstrate their learning. Lower level literacy learners (struggling writers) will articulate their ideas from graphic organizer to a teacher, who transcribes for them into first draft. Teacher will provide sentence frames and sentence starters to help students express their thoughts. Students with high literacy skills will be encouraged to write longer and more detailed persuasive letters.
2013-2014

6. Theory: Which theories support your unit/lesson plan? (explain the connections) Think-pair-share (as we go over parts of a letter during mini lesson in the beginning) cooperative discussion strategy that provides students time and structure for thinking and it enables them to formulate individual ideas and share them with a classmate and even the entire class. This can fall under sociocultural theory because learning is collaborative, teacher and students are both involved in the learning process. Students participation in social interactions promotes learning and deeper understanding of the concept being taught. I also applied their professed interests to build on interest and relevancy during my lesson as read them a book about a pet and then constructed their writing prompt around persuading an audience to let them have a pet of their choice. Luis Moll supports this idea of culturally relevant curriculum as he claims that incorporating students funds of knowledge into lessons is imperative. Moll argues that if students can apply and see their own knowledge, interests, and experiences being incorporated into the classroom, they are able to see that learning and knowledge is meaningful. Additionally, during my lesson, scaffolding will be essential for all students successful learning. During this lesson, I scaffold transferring information from a graphic organizer to a first draft of a persuasive letter. During this lesson, I scaffold making sure to include persuasive writing words, transition words and organizing my letter in the correct format. The instructional strategy, scaffolding, can fall under Vygotskys theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which has been defined as the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky). Vygotsky believed that when a student is at the ZPD for a particular task, providing the appropriate assistance will give the student enough of an improvement to achieve the task on their own. Thus, if I scaffold these skills necessary for successful completion of the first draft, the students will eventually master these skills and will be able to complete them again on their own, without the scaffold. The writing process is thought to be the process through which people communicate thoughts and ideas. It is a highly complex, cognitive, self-directed activity, driven by the goals writers set for what they want to do and say and the audience(s) for whom they are writing. It is really important that students develop this skill. 7. Reflection: (answer the following questions after the teaching of this unit/lesson) What do you feel was successful in your lesson and why? If you could go back and teach this learning segment again to the same group of students, what would you do differently in relation to planning, instruction, and assessment? How could the changes improve the learning of students with different needs and characteristics? I thought this lesson went extremely well. My students were not only engaged, but they very well behaved and respectful to me, and to their peers throughout the entire lesson. I also thought my visual aids, such as the five parts of a letter poster, the transition words poster, the persuasive writing words poster, and my large graphic organizer and draft were very useful as my students could to access them at all times during this lesson. I think the way I the lesson successfully, as I tried to include many students in writing the draft. It was as if the students and I co-constructed each sentence. In the end the students all composed wonderful first drafts and I am very happy with how smooth the lesson went and how engaged and on task the class was. One thing that I may have changed was giving them more time to work together. Or in the beginning, as I was reviewing vocabulary words, I might have given them some time to think, pair, share. It was funny, I encouraged them to work together as they wrote their first draft to share ideas, help one another, but the class was so quiet because they were so into what they were doing. **COMMENTARY IS REQUIRED FOR ALL UCLA ELEMENTARY FORMAL OBSERVATIONS **
2013-2014