UCLA Center X TEP ELEMENTARY UNIT/ LESSON PLANNING COMMENTARY Your Name: Sarah Patterson Date: 1/28/14 Unit/Lesson

Title: Science and Descriptive Writing / Descriptive Essay Pre-write Interview Grade Level and Content Area: Grade 5, writing Number of Students: 30 Total Amount of Time: 35 minutes

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? Students will learn about the structure of an interview and how to write their own interview questions to help them write a descriptive essay. By the end of the lesson, students will know how to write interview questions and how to conduct an interview. 2. Rationale: Why is this content important for your students to learn and how does it promote social justice? This content is important because it provides them with another pre-writing tool that they can use in their research projects in the future. Knowing how to interview a person will provide students with an opportunity to learn from someone, and show them the value of asking questions of someone else. This content promotes social justice by giving students the skills and opportunity to connect with someone around them, a key component in social justice learning. 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 be encouraged to use listening comprehension skills to gear questions and respond to the answers the interview subject gives them. Students will need to depend on their written language to supply questions, their reading language to retrieve questions, and their oral language to relate questions. Students will learn academic language of an interview and perform a mock interview in English, however if the subject of their interview speaks another language than English, they will be encouraged to use that language. The focus of this lesson, though aiding language development, is to promote students research skills. 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? e have been learning about descriptive language for a couple weeks now. Students have practiced describing using oral language and writing in short essays. The interview will build students research skills as they approach a research project for their science unit in !anguage "rts. Students will be encouraged to choose a subject of their interest. #y students will have the opportunity to develop their oral language with practice and sharing. "lso, they will be able to build the evaluative skills they will soon need in middle school to assess their peers and their own work. . Acco!!odations: What accommodations or support will you use for all students including English #anguage #earners and students with special educational needs, i$e$ %&'E students and students with (E)"s!? E*plain how these features of your learning and assessment tasks will provide all students access to the curriculum and allow them to demonstrate their learning$ For this lesson, students will be asked to write in English, but if appropriate, perform their interview in their home language (if the first language of the interview subject is not English). For students who are struggling or
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slow writers, this process will help them develop their thoughts for their essay. Partner sharing will give struggling readers and non-struggling readers alike the opportunity to revise their questions. I will also be circulating during the writing period specifically to provide assistance to writers who need assistance developing and writing questions. ". #$eor%: Which theories support your unit/lesson plan? e*plain the connections! My lesson is supported by sociocultural learning theory, which says that students learn best through interactions in their environment. Using sociocultural learning theory, my students will engage in partner sharing activities and provide feedback to one another, bolstering their exposure to social teaching within the classroom context.

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 think the lesson itself was very successful; the kids were excited and engaged. I was really excited by the questions they were asking, which for the most part were open-ended and showed a lot of complex thinking. My favorite was a girl who asked her dad if he liked his work and if he felt lonely working alone. In the future I would add a handout. I would also love to draw them out over a week and give a whole weekend to conduct a longer interview. I would encourage students to practice on partners they know well, since the interview between antagonistic partners (my front pair) were ineffective. I felt very badly about how I handled one tables poor management, and felt I was inconsistent with how I manage the class. I need to come up with a method to get kids quiet when I am talking, like raining my hand. I would also maybe add background music to aid our classroom volume.

**COMMENTARY IS REQUIRED FOR ALL UCLA ELEMENTARY FORMAL OBSERVATIONS **

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