UCLA Center X TEP ELEMENTARY UNIT/ LESSON PLANNING COMMENTARY Your Name: Jenna Fishoff Date: March 11,

2014 Unit/Lesson Title: Soil: Writing a Recipe for Edible Soil and its Different Layers Grade Level and Content Area: Second Grade Science Number of Students: 24 Total Amount of Time: 1 hour 1. Learning Goals/Standards: What concepts, essential questions or key skills will be your focus? What do you want your students to know at the end of this unit/lesson? Students will be able to identify, label, and define the different types and different layers of soil. Students will also be able to write a recipe for edible soil using sequencing words. 2. Rationale: Why is this content important for your students to learn and how does it promote social justice? 3. Identifying and supporting language needs: What are the language demands of the unit/lesson? How do you plan to support students in meeting their English language development needs (including academic language)? Students will be need to demonstrate understanding of key words: soil, natural resource, organic, humus, topsoil, subsoil, bedrock, conservation, nutrient, weathered, erosion, sand, silt, clay, recipe, sequence words. Students will also need to write a recipe in the correct format and write the instructions using appropriate sequencing words. Students with language needs will be able to model after sentence frames and starters that are hung in the front of the class and/or work with me, or with an aide to relate their recipe, who then transcribes their words. 4. Accessing prior knowledge and building upon students backgrounds, interests and needs: How do your choices of instructional strategies, materials and sequence of learning tasks connect with your students backgrounds, interests, and needs? Students have all been exposed to soil at many times in their lives such as at the park, underneath the grass, at the beach, in their backyards, etc. I will also ask students who has ever followed a recipe to cook or bake something with someone in their family. 5. Accommodations: What accommodations or support will you use for all students (including English Language Learners and students with special educational needs, i.e. GATE students and students with IEPs)? Explain how these features of your learning and assessment tasks will provide all students access to the curriculum and allow them to demonstrate their learning. For ELLs, I will chart key words used in their graphic organizers, and they can also work in small group with an aide. Posters and other visual aids, such as pictures, will be placed in the front of the class for students to access. Lower level literacy students will be able to draw or relate their ideas to an aide or me who will transcribe their words. Flashcards will also be made with corresponding pictures for students to match. Sentence frames and sentences starters with also be available.

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6. Theory: Which theories support your unit/lesson plan? (explain the connections) During my lesson, scaffolding will be essential for all students successful learning. In this lesson, I scaffold not only how to successfully create edible soil while modeling appropriate behavior for hands-on activities, but I also scaffold how to write instructions in the form of a recipe. The instructional strategy, scaffolding, can fall under Vygotskys theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which has been defined as the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky). Vygotsky believed that when a student is at the ZPD for a particular task, providing the appropriate assistance will give the student enough of an improvement to achieve the task on their own. Thus, if I scaffold these skills necessary for successful completion of the first draft, the students will eventually master these skills and will be able to complete them again on their own, without the scaffold. 7. Reflection: (answer the following questions after the teaching of this unit/lesson) What do you feel was successful in your lesson and why? If you could go back and teach this learning segment again to the same group of students, what would you do differently in relation to planning, instruction, and assessment? How could the changes improve the learning of students with different needs and characteristics?

**COMMENTARY IS REQUIRED FOR ALL UCLA ELEMENTARY FORMAL OBSERVATIONS **

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