Curriculum Page Creation

For this week’s activity for my Master’s class, I began creating a curriculum page on my Wiki.  It is not a finished curriculum page, but if you would like to view it, you can click the following link:  http://mylovie.wikispaces.com/  

            Surprisingly, making this curriculum page was not very difficult, though it did take a fairly long time to do.  My curriculum page is going to be for my third graders to use to learn about one of the six traits of writing in more depth, research an author who is an exemplary model for the trait, and finally create a digital storytelling presentation using Prezi or PowerPoint.  I followed a web quest template provided in one of the lessons in my class to begin my curriculum page.

            The first thing I learned while completing this activity is that a curriculum page can be extremely useful.  Coincidentally, my third grade team all had substitute teachers today so that we could meet to have a “curriculum day.”  We focused on our reading and math curriculum and made sure that all the benchmarks of the Sunshine State Standards are covered in our textbooks.  Then we decided which benchmarks could use some supplemental material to make sure we are teaching them in enough depth and with enough frequency.  We printed copies of most the additional activities we are going to use, which became tedious and was difficult to organize.  Then I came home and created my curriculum page for this assignment.  As I was making it, I realized how useful it could have been for our team to just have created a curriculum page as we went along today and created links to the different activities, rather than printing them all out.  We could have created one page for ourselves to use as a reference and another that our students could use to complete the activities.  Now that I know how easy they are to make, I will suggest that we make one or a few in the future.

            Another fact that I discovered through this activity is that a quality curriculum page is not too complicated to make, but it is time consuming.  I only did a few parts of my curriculum page, and it took a very long time.  If I would have created a complete page, there is no way I would have been able to complete it in one day.  Additionally, if my team had made a curriculum page for reading and math today, I think we would have needed to divide up the additional work and finish it outside of school.  The benefit of the curriculum page is that once you have completed it, everything the students need is right there.  You do not need to be scrambling for different resources, websites, rubrics, etc.  It is much more organized, and the students can’t lose anything because it is all online.  This definitely takes time to do thoroughly.

            A final aspect I discovered while creating this curriculum page is that I need to become more familiar with the specific Benchmarks of the Sunshine State Standards.  Other teachers on my team have them memorized down to the exact wording.  Since I had just gone over them today, I figured it would be easy for me to list the SSS that my curriculum page would address on my Wiki; however, I was not able to remember any of them.  Since I didn’t know them off the top of my head, I just left them out of my curriculum page.  I will look them up and add them in later, and I will hopefully have time to study them too.  I know what I need to be teaching in general as I have taught third grade for four years, but I need to work on being able to write specific benchmarks in my own words without looking them up.  This will help me teach them if I know what they are at all times, not just when I’m in front of my computer or binder.

            In conclusion, I hope that my curriculum page is the start to something I will truly use in the future.  In making it, I learned that curriculum pages are useful and fairly easy to create, but take a lot of time to make properly.  I also learned that I need to study my Benchmarks and Sunshine State Standards so that I do not have to look them up every time I am writing a lesson plan or making something like this curriculum page.  I look forward to finishing my curriculum page in the weeks to come.