Jessica Hane

4/25/14
Inquiry Unit

Section 1: Student Information

This semester, I was placed in a K-5 resource room. There are currently 13 students
on the caseload, however this number has changed several times within the last few
weeks due to students moving or being taken off/being put on services. Of those 13
students, five of them are in second-grade, two are in third-grade, three are in
fourth-grade, and three are in fifth-grade.

All students vary in terms of disability, but the majority of these students are
certified with learning disabilities or ADHD. Three students are more impacted and
have differentiating levels of cerebral palsy. Two of these students are boys and are
in wheelchairs and nonverbal. They both use an ECO device to communicate. The
other student with cerebral palsy is not as impacted. She is not in a wheelchair,
however she is nonverbal. She uses an iPad app called LAMP to communicate, as
well as some sign language and sounds.

Most of these students have been in the resource room with the same lead teacher
since they were in kindergarten. Therefore, the fifth-graders have had this same
resource room teacher for up to six years and are now very comfortable in this
classroom. On the other hand, one of the third-grade male students is brand new to
the school this year, and was just placed in the resource room at the beginning of
this semester. He is adjusting to the new school and new classroom, so he often
struggles to adjust and fit in with students who have been together for several years.

Section 2: Planning My Unit

Many students in this resource room struggle with writing. They often write for a
short 15-minute period in one day, and quickly say they are done. Often times, their
writing is very scattered with no clear beginning, middle or end. There is also
generally a lot of errors in their writing since they did not take the time to plan or
edit. They did not understand that writing was a process and can often take several
days or longer to finish. Therefore, I knew my goal would be to help students learn
the writing process through POWER.

In order to teach this lesson successfully, I wanted to provide visual posters, graphic
organizers for each stage, and model what each step of the process looks like. I also
wanted to make the unit a little more memorable, so I found a great rap about the
POWER writing process and decided to play that at the beginning of the unit.

In order to teach this inquiry unit, I had to find a good topic to research, read, and
write about. Since we have had such a cold winter, I decided to have students write
about if they have liked living in this cold Michigan winter, or if they would rather
live somewhere else. This project would require students to research why they like
living here, or why they would want to live somewhere else. This left students in
charge of learning what they wanted through their own inquiry, however it also
gave them a guide to stay within so they would have an idea of what topic to
research.

Section 3: Planning, Activating and Building Background Knowledge
Day One:
(WRITING LESSON) Introduce POWER through music video:
https://www.flocabulary.com/writing-process/.
Show the POWER poster and where it will be hanging in the room. Next to
each stage of the writing process, there is an arrow that says what does it
look like? and points to an example of what that stage looks like. Here is the
poster:

The writing prompt will be displayed on the board and the class will
brainstorm specifics to write about.
Explain that students will be using the writing process over the next couple
of weeks to write an organized paragraph based on what we already know
along with new information that we will be reading about.
Students will each get a checklist to use throughout the unit so they know
what is expected at each stage of the writing process, it looks like this:

Day Two:
Put clothespins on the P in POWER poster, and introduce step one in the
writing process: plan.
As students sit in a small group, I will model how to use the plan sheet on the
ELMO for all students to see.
Each student gets their own plan sheet to answer whom they will be writing
for, why, and important facts they know or want to know for their writing.


Section 4: Teaching Strategies for Gathering, Recording, and Organizing
Information
Day Three:
Move clothespins to O on the POWER poster and introduce organize by
modeling how to use the graphic organizer with the ELMO.
Each student will get his or her own organization graphic organizer to fill in.
As they organize, they will write questions they want to answer when they
begin research.
During this stage, it is important to emphasize that everything on the
organization sheet must stick to the main topic.

Day Four:
(READING LESSON): Students will use information taught in the reading
lesson today to read articles about their topic effectively. Here is picture of
students researching and reading about their topic.



Section 5: Building Additional Background Knowledge
Day Five:
Students will continue to read articles and books they found on their topic.
They will take notes and add information in the appropriate places on their
organization sheets to prepare to write their paragraphs.

Section 6: Drafting, Editing, and Revising Final Products
Day Six:
Move clothespins to W on the POWER poster and model how to use the
organization and plan sheets to make a complete paragraph.
As I write, I will purposely make mistakes so that it can be edited at the later
stage.
After modeling the writing stage, students will draft their paragraphs using
their organization and plan sheets to help guide them as they write.
During this stage, I will meet with all students individually to check in on
their writing.
Day Seven:
Move clothespins to E on the POWER poster and model how to edit.
As I model editing my draft written during the previous lesson, I will use the
editing checklist and show students how I use it as I edit.
During this lesson, it is important that students know what they are looking
for as they edit.
After students edit their papers, they will switch with a peer and edit each
others. Here are pictures of the editing checklist and a student sample after
being edited:


Day Eight:
Move clothespins to the R on the POWER poster and model how to rewrite
final copy with all errors corrected, this can be typed or handwritten.
Here is a sample of a students final revised copy:


Section 7: Presenting or Publishing Final Products/Assessment and
Accountability for Learning

Day Nine:
After all students have finished their revised copy, they will share their final
copy to their classmates by reading it aloud.
This step is very important because students need to understand what will
be done with their final writing piece. If they never get the chance to share
their final copy, they may not feel as though it has importance.
As students take turns reading their paragraph aloud, they will stand at the
front of the class and speak clearly and loudly for all students to hear.
Another important aspect of this step is that peers practice being good
listeners and showing respect to their classmates, while at the same time
hearing ideas from peers.

Section 8: Reflection and Critique of Unit (Narrative of Strengths, Weaknesses,
and Next Steps)

Overall, the unit went very well. I was very proud of the progress my students made
from the beginning to the end. One weakness is the topic chosen for this assignment.
The goal was to give students a broad topic that still allowed them freedom within it
to explore what they wanted. The point of this was so that students did not get too
frustrated and stuck with trying to choose a topic. This particular group of students
often shuts down when they have too many choices and this then hinders them for
the rest of the lesson. With that in mind, I was trying to help guide the students into
a broad topic. However, this still ended up being too broad for some students, and
slowed them down tremendously in the overall process. In the future, I may provide
a list of specific topics that students can choose from. That way students will be able
to choose what they want to research, however they will have a list of options to
choose from rather than coming up with one completely on their own.

A strength of this lesson was the music video that I played at the beginning of the
unit, and ended up playing a few more times throughout the unit due to student
request. This was a great engaging way to start out the unit. Students loved being
able to read the lyrics during the video (which also helps build fluency) and loved
that it was a rap to teach rather than a teacher talking. I knew this benefited the
students because right away they began naming the stages of the writing process,
and were eager to explain it to classmates who missed that lesson. They also
continued to ask to listen to the video, so it ended up working as a great reward for
when students finished their work.