Literacy Formative Assessment

Literacy Formative Assessment

I designed this lesson as if I was teaching a unit on World War II in a 7th and 8th grade Social Studies classroom.  My students will be reading Our Longest Days, a book that offers an overview of the war and compiles diary entries from actual people that lived throughout the war.  I thought this was a good book selection because it ranked as a middle school reading level and it demonstrated two types of writing (diaries and informational). I planned the lesson as if the students already read the book in its entirety.

The lesson is discussion based.  Students will work in groups and share ideas, achieving criterion 3.1. To transition to a class discussion, students will have to get up and create a timeline, meeting criterion 3.2 because it demonstrates my understanding of active learning.  This is important during a 90 minute period.  Performance criterion 4.1 and 4.2 were met because students learned how to read the diary entries like a historian. Students had to think about context and language while reading.  They had to make connections between wartime events and the experiences of the diarists and make inferences about how certain events could shape the lives of the diarists.  Finally, performance criterion 6.1 was achieved because multiple methods of assessment were used.  I can measure my students understanding by listening to their discussions, collecting their graphic organizers/notes, and reviewing their timeline they created.

In the future, I would like to learn more strategies on how to plan a lesson for a long period.  I found it difficult to break up the class into sections.