Unit Planning

Introduction

Unit plans act as guidelines for certain sections of our overarching curriculum maps. Units can last from 3 to 6 weeks and cover a variety of smaller topics. This unit plan includes ideas for many different individual lessons which will lead up to a culminating project where students are able to create something that demonstrates their understanding of standards and is also culturally relevant to them.

Unit Plan Relevance

This Social Studies unit plan focuses around the concepts of "My Community and its Economy". The goal of this unit is for students to get an understanding of how people earn and spend money, as well as how money is used to satisfy peoples' wants and needs. This covers a large section of Louisiana Standards for Social Studies, and is allocated approximately a month of teaching time, with many lessons introducing concepts which will ultimately lead to a culminating project where students create their own classroom economy.

This culminating project will be cross-curricular, addressing multiple Arts and Social Studies standards, as well as requiring students to use environmental math to "buy" items that are both wants and needs from our classroom store while following a budget. Students will use their visual arts skills to create the store and its currency, as well as using their drama skills to act out different roles in the economy, such as employees, customers, managers, and producers.

This project is also culturally relevant because students can choose what products they would like to sell at our store. New Orleans has a historical food culture, so examples of this might be students choosing to sell crawfish or jambalaya at their grocery store. This is something that they would be used to seeing in their life outside of school and would allow them to make more connections between this project and their real lives.

Conclusion

Unit planning is a necessary step because it helps teachers narrow down from the curriculum map, but still focus on a bigger picture. Lesson plans within a unit must have some cohesion, and are most effective when the lessons support each other to add up to a culminating project or final assessment. By considering our standards and content goals, as well as thinking about what would make a unit most interesting and engaging for the students, I created an arts-integrated unit plan that aims to help students better understand the world around them.

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