2. Content Area and Pedagogical Knowledge 

When creating this trade books assignment, at first this was a foreign idea to me, but I quickly found out that they are not used for a specific audience or academic purpose, but can be used more generally.  It was also made clear to me that when working with trade books to implement with students, it is important to determine specific aspects of the text, such as how many words there are on each page, the type of vocabulary that is used within the book, and how many total pages there are within the book.  All of these components contribute to the readability level of the book, which connects to how this helped me develop skills for equipping myself to evaluate resources and materials to use with my students, even beyond literacy content areas.  

This artifact meets performance indicator 2I which states, "The competent teacher evaluates resources and materials for appropriateness as related to curricular content and each student's needs" because it shows the way in which I found a piece of text for students and was able to go through and evaluate various aspects of it.  This included the readability level, if it was fitting for a certain grade level, and how it could be used within the classroom context for students.  The creation of this artifact encouraged teacher candidates to strive for increasing their overall content area literacy skills.  

Throughout my experience with learning how to evaluate the appropriateness of specific trade books and texts in general, especially regarding their individual readability level, I was able to learn valuable skills for how to go about assessing varying student materials to ensure that they are relevant and fit to meet the needs of students.  I realized that determining the appropriateness of materials as related to curricular content and each student's needs, along with figuring out how to evaluate resources and materials within literacy are very important skills for teachers to have.  Perhaps more importantly than that however, are that these are skills that can and should be transferred across the board to all content areas before implementing resources and materials with students.  This can make all the difference for planning for student needs and promoting even more student success and independence in the classroom context. 

This detailed lesson plan was created to provide students with an introduction to new content for the beginning of a new unit of study on oceans within our school's social studies curriculum.  That being said, within this lesson plan, there was more focus on exposing students to the new content, along with vocabulary related to what was being taught.  This was done in a more scaffolded manner to provide students with a strong foundation for their learning within each activity that was completed.  The importance of guiding student learning for this beginning lesson of our new social studies unit was to ensure that students were provided with instruction in a way that they were able to comprehend the big take aways that they needed to learn.  This would set them up for success in the next lessons to come as we continue on in this unit of study.

This artifact meets knowledge indicator 2G, which states, "The competent teacher understands the theory behind and the process of providing support to promote learning when concepts and skills are first being introduced."  I knew that I needed to approach this new unit of study in a more teacher-led format for my students.  I made sure that I set up my lesson activities in a more structured manner so that students were being provided with instruction and content in a multi-modal manner that also allowed for more support to be given from myself and staff members to students.  We also made sure to incorporate a great deal of modeling on student communication devices to serve as an additional speech and language support to students when highlighting key concepts and vocabulary related to lesson content being given to students within the lesson plan. 

When creating and writing this detailed lesson plan for my students, I had to develop and craft my thoughts and activities in a different way to prepare content for students in a more outlined manner overall.  I wanted to learn how to create a foundational lesson plan that I could build off of moving forward to connect to future lesson plans within this new unit of study, and I believe that I achieved this throughout preparing this lesson plan.  I learned how to set my students up for more academic success in a way that began with modeling and implementing more support, but over time will work towards fading staff prompting to promote more student independence overall.  This is important for me as a future educator to have the skill set on to ensure that I am providing supports as needed, but still allowing my students to be challenged and work through difficult tasks and make mistakes, so that they can grow, learn, and develop even more towards their highest individual potential as a result.