Over the past 10 years I've created notes for nearly a dozen different math, language arts, and science curricula, and I always start by looking at the structure of the textbook since most follow a consistent formula from lesson to lesson.
In the curriculum my school uses the first page of each lesson is usually an info dump or a think about it type of problem. With the exception of a few lessons this part usually isn't student friendly, leads to a lot of frustration, and has too much consolidated info, so I usually find the majority of the material for my notes on the second and third pages of each lesson in my book.
I try to limit what I put in my notes and spoken lesson to the 2-3 most important sentences from the book's lesson with blanks put in not for the bolded vocabulary words but for the smaller, yet still critical for understanding, words.
I've also noticed that a lot of curriculum give examples of how they want things worked out, and I love using these in my notebooks since I can highlight alternate ways to do the problems, have students compare back to the book, and have the kids use them for hints and answer checks.
I've found that basing my spoken lesson off the notebook I've created for my students helps me to target my instruction and keep each lesson straightforward and easy to understand.
The majority of my lesson and notebook is based off the book's examples with room for the kids to work them out themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment