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Mapping for Success - ST Week 4.3

After a busy week of planning warm-ups and parts of lessons around school assemblies and team meetings, I am grateful to have this morning (Saturday) to reflect on the past few days of my student teaching experience. While there were many ups and some downs throughout the week, I would like to highlight the so far successful lesson plan and materials I designed with the support of a special educator to accommodate one of my students with Down Syndrome. Our class is still focusing on Westward Expansion in the United States, and together with reading and writing activities, our students are also working on developing map comprehension skills that combine identifying geographic locations with an understanding of cardinal directions. For the lesson I created, I chose to harness my student’s major interests in identifying shapes on a map as certain places, creating a mini timeline project that tracks the addition of new states to the Union as white settlers pushed west.


Source: https://ticonderogasummer.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/labeled-westward-expansion-map.jpg


Using a Google Docs table I made with western state names, their shapes, and their establishment dates already filled in, I asked my student to complete the table by finding each state’s corresponding flag and another image that represents the state today (like a state flower, bird, etc.). The two table columns my student completed feature a website link in the heading that I deemed useful for finding the required information about each state. After completing the table, my student printed out their work and began cutting out each state and the associated images they found one by one. As my student cuts out each state based on their establishment years (they are in order from oldest to newest on the table), they glue the images to a long sheet of paper with a timeline drawn on it, placing the state name/shape/year box on the actual timeline and the other images around it. While their timeline is not finished yet, my student is on the right path to successfully completing my lesson and demonstrating their knowledge of western U.S. states.

As a future educator, I think one of my biggest fears as I continue my student teaching semester is the worry that I am over or underestimating the abilities of my students with disabilities. The fact that my western U.S. states lesson is not only practical for my student, but also producing evidence that they are learning within their ZPD is a huge victory in my book this week. Embracing a “there is always room for improvement” philosophy, however, I look forward to examining the final timeline product at the end of my student’s multi–day lesson. While I know my student is now correctly identifying states by shape, flag, and other symbols, I hope that the timeline they produce will prove to be useful in understanding concepts of “then and now” as we progress through North America’s chronological history. I also hope that the usability of the final timeline will highlight any flaws in my lesson plan, particularly in my wording of directions or the actual format of the Google Doc. Working closely with a special educator to better understand the strengths and limitations of my students, I am confident that my accommodated lesson planning for students with disabilities will continue to improve over the course of the semester, but I am pretty proud of the success my first implemented lesson plan with specific accommodations for a single student has allowed my student to achieve thus far.

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