Aquatic Animal Research Project
During every practicum I have completed, I take time at the beginning to focus on conducting conversations with every child. I record notes on whether they have siblings, wear reading glasses, attend speech therapy, whether they need extra support or extending, and what their interests are. These notes (See document below) enable me to plan engaging activities incorporating students’ interests and cater for their varying levels of abilities (Standard 1.2). |
For example, during my practicum with Year 2, when the class was learning about a water unit, the students showed a large interest in water animals. Thus I followed their interest and planned an aquatic animal project. Students chose their favourite aquatic animal, used the laptops and iPads to research them and created a poster (Standard 2.6). This open-ended project, engaged students, as it incorporated their interests (both aquatic animals and ICT) also catering for a variety of learning styles (visual & kinaesthetic).
Throughout the planning for this unit I utilised the appropriate curriculum documents, such as the Australian Curriculum and the Early Years Learning Framework. These documents informed my planning; ensuring the units of work/lessons were quality, age appropriate learning experiences (Standard 2.3). I structured the unit to include lessons before the research commenced to provided the students with the knowledge and skills to support and scaffold their research. They included what aquatic animals were classified as, the different zones in the ocean, prey and predators and basic web searching skills. This lesson sequence was not incorporated into my mentor teacher's planning for the water unit, however this was a major opportunity to enhance students learning by building and following their interests (Standard 3.2). The document below includes the first segments from all lesson plans planned for the aquatic animal project. They demonstrate the planning and structuring of the unit, ensuring the curriculum requirements were met and the sequence was appropriate to scaffold students' learning. |
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