Autumn Zaminski
Lessons
Showcase Unit
After attending profound professional learning sessions this year, I decided to try to do a multi-layered 21st century learning unit. I knew that my students needed to possess specific skills in order to be successful as a learner in the future. With all of that in mind, my focus became the 4C's with the heart of all lessons focused on Creativity.
4C's Lesson
We started this unit with an anchor lesson about the 4C's. I knew in order for the students to demonstrate these skills, they needed to learn what they were and what it looks like to use them. Please click the Lesson Plan button above to view the detailed lesson plan that I used to teach this lesson. A special thank you to Peter H. Reynolds who created this video and the book Going Places. He has such powerful messages that are relatable to the youngest of learners. Below is our anchor chart and the video we used to learn about the 4C's.
Learning to Code
Learning to code has been a dream of mine for both my students and myself. I knew that the 4C's was a perfect tie in because I knew that coding required a lot of critical thinking. They would be learning a new language!
Learning to code started in our class with a sweet story called Hello Ruby. To learn more about our adventure with Hello Ruby, see our blog post on the Hello Ruby website! Linda Liukas featured our story on her blog! When we saw our words on her blog, we were VERY excited!
Below you can find a video sharing a quick glimpse of our adventure. Then our class learned to code using two different robots. Dash by Wonder Workshop and "King Ozy" by Ozobot.
During our reading and science block, we began a unit on people and things that have changed the world. We were learning about all of this while coding.
Our unit on changing the world began with a study of average people who changed the world to make it a better place. The students started the first day by sharing their dreams about changing the world with their student portfolios.
Then the students did research on a person who changed the world and shared their information in a format of their choice. Please see our Vimeo account to check out our projects!
Finally, we discussed what it means to be a problem finder and a problem solver. We began to look for problems in our own school to solve. Then we innovated ways to solve those problems. See our Class Twitter to see what problem we solved!
