Rationale for Water Unit Plan

Alverno Advanced Education Ability: Coordination Manages resources

effectively to support learning goals.
Wisconsin Standards for Educator Development and Licensure:
Standard 1 The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry,
and structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches and can create learning
experiences that make these aspects of subject matter meaningful for
students.
Wisconsin Standards for Educator Development and Licensure:
Standard 4 The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional
strategies to encourage students' development of critical thinking, problem
solving, and performance skills.
This unit plan focuses on the curriculum area of science and the water
cycle. It was created for first grade students who have some schema about
water. My instructional objectives were for students to understand the way
they impact the environment, specifically how they use water and how they
can conserve it. In developing the unit plan on water conservation, I choose
standards that accurately represent what I expect the students to
demonstrate upon completion of the unit.
Wisconsin teaching standard number 1 states that the teacher
understands the content and how to connect concepts to guide students to
think deeply and collaboratively problem solve authentic problems. In this
unit, students learn that there is a finite amount of available water for use on
Earth. Students are introduced to a global issue through a variety of
activities, many of which are interactive for the students. Learning
environments were created to encourage the student to discover and
express understanding across content areas. For example, using the
pictograph to discover how they and their peers use water most frequently
and acting out a skit to communicate what they have learned.
A variety of instructional strategies (Wisconsin teaching standard 4) in
this unit were used to provide students with opportunities to think critically
and problem solve in a way that makes sense to them. The teacher
encourages individual students to share what they know about water and
extends their knowledge by asking them what they would like to know about
water through the KWL chart. This method also opens the door for class
discussion and collaborative learning. The summative assessment of creating
a poster with a way to conserve water while at school reflects collaboration
between students and a positive social interaction within the school.

This unit reflects the ability to effectively coordinate time, materials,

and resources to produce a cohesive and interactive unit for the 1st grade
students (Alverno ability coordination). In the lesson about the water cycle, I
use a video of The Magic School Bus to introduce the information to the
students. The class experiments that go along with All the Water in the World
and Franco the Fish show how I manage many materials for a particular
lesson. The community visit to the Urban Ecology Center utilizes community
resources to bring closure to the lesson and reminds the students that the
water they are using is right outside their door and that they can do
something to protect it.