Standard 6: Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication

This artifact is a lesson plan that I created for my Middle Grades Literacy course. The lesson is centered on Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. In it, my partner and I incorporated important vocabulary terms into the lesson.

This lesson plan meets Indicator 6A, which states that the competent teacher "understands appropriate and varied instructional approaches used before, during, and after reading, including those that develop word knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and strategy use in the content areas." We used vocabulary strategies in this lesson in order to get students to become familiar with the terms related to the Civil Rights Movement. These included "Imagine That" -having them role-play the identity of a different person involved in the discussed events and explain how they were affected by the vocabulary word. Finally, we included using the vocabulary words as a requirement of the summative assessment included in the lesson.

I learned some great literacy strategies in this course. The vocabulary methods were equally helpful. I believe that all content areas can be enhanced and need to be informed by literacy strategies, but history is an especially important area where reading and writing have to come into play. By learning these techniques, my instruction has only been enriched.