PA History Unit Plan
I am proud of this unit plan because I was successfully able to align PA state standards, to my objectives, and then design a meaningful assessment. As you can see below, I was able to create a pre-assessment using the objectives I had from the five lessons I created. I took each objective and turned it into a question in order to assess the students current knowledge about that topic. I think this is often overlooked in the social studies classroom. It is much easier to do a pre-assessment in a math class because most of those answers are direct and to the point. Social Studies areas such as history and civics can be involve general concepts but can also become very in-depth. I can remember that I was never challenged during my middle school social studies classes because I was gaining the information through my parents at home. I was never pushed to learn more in depth concepts about the civil war, but rather the teacher accepted that I simply knew the content. For this reason, teachers in social studies classrooms should be willing to pre-assess students in order to help students either reach the objectives and standards given, or even surpass them if possible.
I was also able to incorporate both PA academic standards as well as NCSS standards, which give more of a board range of purpose. For example, in my first lesson, my objectives included locating cities on a map, listing cities, and identifying locations. The standards I used involved the ideas of explaining personal development and locating places in Pennsylvania history. I also used the NCSS standard of People, Places, and Environments to encompass the idea of how places and environments shape the people that live there, as well as the other way around. My instructional activity in this lesson in an interactive presentation that involves students doing a map activity that coincides with a power point presentation. Through this unit plan, I was able to learn the importance of aligning multiple aspects of standards, instruction, and assessments, in order to help ensure that students are on track to reach objective goals and standards.
I was also able to incorporate both PA academic standards as well as NCSS standards, which give more of a board range of purpose. For example, in my first lesson, my objectives included locating cities on a map, listing cities, and identifying locations. The standards I used involved the ideas of explaining personal development and locating places in Pennsylvania history. I also used the NCSS standard of People, Places, and Environments to encompass the idea of how places and environments shape the people that live there, as well as the other way around. My instructional activity in this lesson in an interactive presentation that involves students doing a map activity that coincides with a power point presentation. Through this unit plan, I was able to learn the importance of aligning multiple aspects of standards, instruction, and assessments, in order to help ensure that students are on track to reach objective goals and standards.