Early Planning

Where to begin to discuss the progress of this unit plan. To be completely honest I have not devoted nearly enough time to this assignment to this point as I would like to. I have found that it has been extremely difficult to get motivated to get further along than my partner and I are at this point. Add on to the fact that it appears that my classmates have a much better idea of where they are headed with this assignment. I am disappointed in the slow progress my partner and I have made, but I know in the end we will have a great unit plan. Although I have a lot on my plate, working, school, tutoring, planing a wedding and a class reunion, that is no excuse for my lack of progress. For now, I need to step it up and really start to focus on this assignment. I have to agree with Kirsten, that having only collaboration through the Internet makes it difficult, and for me somewhat frustrating because I do work so much better when I am able to interact with someone face to face. Maybe that should be our next option, seeing if we can't maybe meet in person to work on some of this unit plan.

With all that being said, we have made some decisions thus far, in addition to some progress. We have decided upon using the middle school that I currently work at as our school. I have researched the school and the school district and the demographics are ready to roll. I know that my partner has researched the standards for 8th grade, which is the grade level we have decided upon. I suppose I should state that we have decided to focus our unit plan on Language Arts, more specifically Historical Fiction. Now, we will have to begin to put things together and post them to our wiki.

Although the two of us have not stated our essential questions to one another, I do have several I have thought about. What is historical fiction? What are the characteristics of historical fiction? Why are historical fiction books written? I know that many times these are the questions that students ask the teachers within my building and I want to be sure that we answer them. I have a teacher at the school I work at that is willing to contribute as much as she can, and I now know that I need to use her as a resource and gain as much information as I can so that we can proceed with this unit plan. My promise is to make more of an effort towards this unit plan from this point on!!

Stacey