Map Lesson Plan

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This is a satelite view of the school I work at in Comstock. The class I work in is a second grade classroom, so any map lesson has to be kept simple. I would connect my computer to the tv and turn it to the channel that shows this map in the satelite view with the street names. Kids can have a paper copy of the map at their seats to help further guide them along in the teaching process.

Earlier this year, the student intern did a lesson on streets and getting from one place to another. Therefore it seemed to make the most sense to have the lesson focus on getting to a student's house to Green Meadow Elementary, thus the point is on the map. A student will tell me what street he or she lives on and find their street (or at least the closet one shown)and have students figure out which directions to go (north, south, east, west) to get from their home to school. This seems the most relevant to students since they live at home and go to to school here most days of the years. The satelite view hits more home since they are seeing what the area that they live in. I believe this will increase the relevance of the lesson itself. Students can then help put symbols on the maps to stand for things (school, store, etc.) and create a key for the maps and draw it on their copies.


After reading chapter 21, there are two trends and issues that hit home to me. The first is about systemic change, particulary districtwide systemic change. This are "any changes or programs instiuted throughout a school district." The most recent example I can think of is the a professional development training I went to this summer. It was for CHAMPS training. The CHAMPs acronym stands for Conversation, Help, Activity, Movement, and Participation. CHAMPs principles include: 1. Classroom organization reflects student behavior, 2. It is the instructor’s responsibility to teach responsible in class behavior, 3. Praise positive behavior instead negative behavior, 4. Response to negative behavior should be brief, calm, and consistent in manner.) This is the format teachers must now follow in planning procedures, rules, and behavior plans. This is new to my district this year and everyone had to attend. Behavior plans would be an example of systematic change because it adopted a new system this year and this immediately came to my mind when I read that part.

The second trend or issue that stuck home to me was the Step up to Excellence. This is to teach school leaders to improve their schools (behavior, test score, etc.) As we all know, all school leaders are looking to improve on those two things as well as enrollment, technology, etc. SUTE involves the following steps: Redesign school sysmem, align cluster performance, align school-site performance, align team and indivdiual performance, and evaluate teh whole-system performance. This what my district kind of did in putting in the CHAMPS in place. Also my building got a new principal and he is implementing new strategies to improve behavior and academic performance.