Darcy Townley

Competency Statement 5: Using Content Knowledge To Build

Meaningful Curriculum
This competency demonstrates the importance that all childhood
professionals understand the content they teach. For example if you
are teaching a lesson about the civil war, do you know about the civil
war? If you as the teacher dont know about the subject you are
teaching how can you effectively teach the subject matter?
To demonstrate my understanding of this competency I chose to
use the story prop box I created in CHD 118: Language Arts for Young
Children. I created various activities that went along with the story
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom that included a flannel/magnet board
activity, and an art activity. I used this story to familiarize 3 and 4 year
old children with both uppercase and lowercase letters. The students
recreated the palm tree they saw in the story with their handprints and
drew both upper and lowercase letters climbing up and falling out of
the tree as they did in the story. The children also took turns recreating
the story on a magnet board with plastic magnetic letters.
I used this story prop box to teach children about the letters of
the alphabet. In order for me to effectively teach this I obviously had to
know each letter and the importance of teaching this subject matter. I
had understand why children need to know the letters of the alphabet
and understand that letter identification is one of the first steps to
literacy. I also had to understand how to effectively teach this material
in various ways. I believe my story prop box did a great job of teaching
the children both upper and lowercase letters in various ways.