Development (Creating Your Own Materials)

To begin, I really don't have any trouble creating my own materials. I love using my creativity side to create awesome assignments for my lesson plans. However, it is easy to think of the idea in my head, but that idea doesn't always play out the way I want to. It takes some serious time to create material that is going to fit perfectly into your lesson development puzzle. After all of that hard work, it pays off to see the lesson pulled off successfully! When I do have trouble thinking of an idea, I usually do some research and combine a variety of ideas and make them my own. I like to compare it to writing a paper. You can conduct your own research but DON'T plagiarize. 

Engaging The Learner

Engaging the learner is one of the most important things. How can you expect children to learn if they aren't engaged? If you can't keep their attention, then their mind will start to wonder, they may start talking with a partner, coloring, etc. It is important to know your students and how they learn. Knowing what interests your students is an advantage, so that you can incorporate that into your lessons.

Collaboration

Collaboration has a huge impact on the way you teach and the way students will learn. For example, collaboration among professionals can create the most powerful lessons; which should be one of your many goals as a teacher. Let's be honest, it all starts with your creation of the lesson plan. In addition, it is also important to have your students collaborate together and learn to work with different personalities.

Assessment

To be honest, I did not include much about assessments in my course outline because that is basically a given. Of course you're going to test students on the material that they just learned. Otherwise, it wouldn't be important enough to teach. However, many objectives are listed on my course outline because I would like to display those objectives on the board for my students to see every day. When I was in elementary and high school, I felt as though the objectives gave purpose to the subject because it told me what I would be learning.

Analysis

I must admit, the course outline assignment was tough! The hardest part was choosing a topic. I chose topic, 1st grade math. I started by looking up the standards for first grade and used those to create my objectives for the course. I struggled with the order of the objectives, so I just put them in an order that made most sense to me. I listed materials needed under the weekly objectives but didn't state much about the lessons. Although time consuming, I think I should have put more in my outline about actually teaching the lessons.