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Update: I’m thrilled to report that we have since been published! If you enjoy this blog post, then you will LOVE our bestselling book Keeping the Wonder: An Educator’s Guide to Magical, Engaging, and Joyful Learning
#Build your wild self lesson plan series#
This is part of a free series of four instructional videos that help you keep the wonder in your classroom. While on the ambient sound train (if you clicked that link and giggled, we can be friends), I would like to direct you to a free 7-minute training video I have that will help you use ambient sounds to spark wonder, create routines, and ignite imagination in the classroom! Click here to get the short video sent to your inbox. This is that magic spark of curiosity we all should be striving for! Getting ready to start Beowulf? There’s an ambient sound for that too! Mead Hall Ambience, who knew!? As I know from experience, simply having something novel projected on your board can create such a buzz around a new unit! Students will walk in and immediately start asking questions about what you are going to be doing in class. What elements did the creator use to produce this mood? Then, lead into your unit or story by asking a curiosity-inducing question related to the content. Getting ready to read something spooky? Play this and have students brainstorm why your classroom felt a little creepy when they walked in. Sometimes they are magical and sometimes they are terrifying: why is this? You can have your favorite selection playing as students walk in and then have them discuss with a partner why forests are often portrayed in a polarizing way in literature. Getting ready to introduce a story with a forest setting or forest symbolism? There are hundreds of ambient forest productions on YouTube, and here is one. Here are just a few to give you some ideas, so let your imagination run wild! Since finding this special station, I’ve since thought to look for other thematic ambient sound stations to play when I introduce a new topic.
#Build your wild self lesson plan manual#
My husband introduced me to my FAVORITE ambient station of all time, and it’s been a gift that keeps on giving (kind of like the antithesis of that manual air mattress pump he got me for Christmas one year ??). If you have two minutes to search YouTube while sipping your morning coffee, then you have time to prep a creative lesson plan hook. I will begin with one of the simplest yet most effective curiosity-sparking tools in my toolkit. It is my hope that I provide you with a variety of ideas so that you can use the simple ones when you are crunched for time or the more elaborate ones when you want to tap into your own creativity! Some of these ELA unit plan introduction ideas will take virtually no prep at all while others will take a little more work.
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10 Creative Ways to Introduce a Literature Unit: If you can hook students at the start of a unit, then your job will be a lot easier for the duration of the study and students will be naturally more engaged with the content. Therefore, tapping into students’ curiosity as you begin a unit will make the learning aspect of your unit easier and more enjoyable for students and teachers alike. In the article, “Piqued: The case for curiosity” the author reports that scientists are discovering that curious learners from low-income households perform as well as affluent students and that all learners are much better at learning information that they are curious about. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, found that “ curiosity can predict not only how much teens will remember about a story they’ve read, but also how thoughtfully they reflect on the story’s characters.” Finding creative ways to introduce a unit isn’t just fluff research suggests that it’s essentially one of the most important aspects of lesson planning.