Chapter 1 - Pt. 2 Unit Planning

1. Goal for unit plan.

One of my goals for my unit plan is for students to be able to extend the idea of limiting reactants from a real-life scenario to a chemical equation. I think that this could be a great mini project for them where they can connect it to whatever they are interested in. So I think that possibly students can pick the profession they are going into like cosmetology, and they can make a project where they talk about the chemicals they have to mix to make a certain hair product like toner to hair dye. Then they can do the research of the chemical equation and then make a question for other students to answer about limiting reactants like if I have this much hair dye and this much toner how much hair stuff can I make? I think that this would get my students connected to the idea of the unit if they could apply it to what they want to do in the future. I would assess this by their projects and how in-depth they could go along with how they worded the question they had for the students. I think this would be great for language demands because we can range the demand of each category in language if students need help with the reading part I can scaffold this area of the project, if students need more help on the speaking of their project we can scaffold that as well. I think that the cognitive demand of this goal is dok 3 or 4 since they have to now apply their knowledge to something the student is creating. 

2. The most important thing to consider while unit planning and how does it connect to lesson planning.

I think that the most important thing to consider while unit planning is knowing what the end goal is and how can we scaffold students to get to this end goal. When we are doing this I think that we should be focusing on what we can do for the whole class, so planning for our middle achievers and how their lesson progression and scaffolds look like and then the day-to-day planning should get into the specifics of how we can put in supports for our other students. This would include modifications of an assignment or differentiation of learning. For example, in my unit plan I know that for the whole class by the end, I want them to be able to extend the idea of limiting reactants to a real-life scenario. I then know in order to do this I want them to do a project and the scaffolds we will use before we get to that project. When I am then planning day-to-day lessons I am going to have each day link back to their real-life project and for some students, it will be more simple than others or I will give them research materials instead of them going and finding it.