Teachers consider many factors when developing unit plans to meet the needs of a variety of students. It is important to consider the strengths and needed accommodations of students in the classroom when developing lessons and units. If there are students with specific language impairments, the teacher must also consider ways to facilitate communication and engagement during classroom instruction. There may need to be a plan to pre-teach vocabulary, or plan certain questions that can be answered by students who may use a device or other mode of communication.

Read the following case scenario to inform the assignment that follows.

April is a fourth grader. Her performance on norm-referenced measures is 1.5 standard deviations below the mean for her chronological age. April has good decoding skills, but has difficulty with reading comprehension, semantics, and morphological processing. One accommodation that is prescribed in the IEP is the use of visual cues to support comprehension of new skills. She lacks organizational skills for writing and struggles with word choice. April receives services from a speech and language pathologist who is working on understanding word parts, vocabulary, and multiple meanings of words. You instruct April in a resource classroom with five other fourth graders who also struggle with reading and written expression.

Using details from the scenario, create a week-long English language arts unit plan based on the Common Core ELA fourth grade literacy standards specific to vocabulary acquisition and use.

Use the COE Lesson Plan Template to complete five formal lesson plans that include the following:

1. A measureable IEP goal for April that includes assistive technology. Include this goal within the “Learning Target” section of the COE Lesson Plan Template.
2. Learning targets aligned to the ELA Common Core fourth grade literacy standards.
3. Strategies to enhance language development and communication skills.
4. Strategies and technologies that encourage development of critical thinking and problem solving.
5. The use of augmentative and alternative communication systems and a variety of assistive technologies to support communication and learning.
6. A unit pre- and post-assessment that incorporates technologies to measure April’s measureable IEP goal progress.

Each lesson plan must be completed and submitted as a separate completed lesson plan.

In addition, provide a 250-500 word rationale that supports your instructional choices in responding to the needs of April, as evidenced by research on best practices for semantics disorders and the use of assistive technology. Support your rationale with a minimum of two scholarly resources.

I have attached my old essays with the professor notes on my essays

Write a 3-4 page letter to the instructor, which includes your own analysis of your work in this class.

You may discuss any of the following in this letter:

* Your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and how these may have changed or your awareness of these may have been altered.

* The essay that you are most pleased with

* The essay that you are least pleased with

* The difficulty level of the various essays you completed for this class

* The format of this class

* The quality of lecture notes, instructor feedback on papers, and other materials

* The helpfulness of the textbook

* Your progress from Comp I to Comp II

Though this letter is to be addressed to the instructor, the real point of this paper is for you to reflect on this semester–how the course did (or did not) help you grow as a writer–and prepare yourself for other writing assignments you may have in the future.

Please be sure to review the Submit Your Assignment of Unit #7 section for specific instructions on how you should turn in your work for grading. The Final Letter to the Instructor is due at the end of Unit #7.

For your final paper in this class, you will be writing a 3-4 page letter to the instructor evaluating this course and your progress this semester.  You will want to use examples and explanation to justify your evaluation.

Again, you may discuss any of the following in this letter:

*Your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and how these may have changed or your awareness of these may have been altered.

*The essay that you are most pleased with

*The essay that you are least pleased with

*The difficulty level of the various essays you completed for this class

*The format of this class

*The quality of lecture notes, instructor feedback on papers, and other materials

*The helpfulness of the textbook

* Your progress from Comp I to Comp II

Please be sure to justify your evaluations of your own work and the course using specific examples whenever possible.

Here are some questions to keep in mind as you are revising your Final Letter to the Instructor:

* Is the overall focus of the letter clear in the first paragraph?  In other words, does the first paragraph make it clear what you’ll be discussing specifically?

* Are examples from your own essays (or the course materials) used to support your claims?

* Is the letter generally well-organized, and does it use transitions effectively?

* Is there a sense of closure (or completion) in the conclusion?

As with all of your other papers, please keep in mind that I’ll still be considering these basics as well:  purpose, focus, organization, tone, and editing. 

Sample Letter to the Instructor

Dear Sheyene,

The reason I took this class was simple: I needed it to graduate.  To be honest, I’d never liked writing much and didn’t expect to enjoy this experience.  However, it was much less painful than I feared and I did learn a great deal.  In this letter, I will be discussing what was most and least helpful in the course.  I will also discuss my own progress and what I got out of this class.

The most helpful aspects of this course for me were the lecture notes and the instructor’s comments on each of my papers.  The lecture notes broke all of the concepts and assignments down into simple terms and steps that were easy to understand.  And you gave me great feedback on all of my papers, pointing out my strengths (which helped to build my self-confidence as a writer) and offering specific suggestions for further improvement.

The textbook was probably the least helpful thing for me, but then I’ve always found it hard to make myself actually read textbooks.  However, I must say that I really did appreciate the approach this course takes to the textbook:  The textbook is a tool.  Rather than reading the whole book (including a lot of stuff that wouldn’t apply to what we were doing), our reading assignments were very focused and always applied directly to the assignment we were working on.

The assignments I enjoyed most were those in which I had total discretion in terms of my topic.  So the letter to the editor and the persuasive research paper were my favorites.  Perhaps, as a result, these were also my two strongest papers in the course.

In my letter to the editor, I discussed the problem of animal neglect and abandonment and proposed a solution, which I called GET TOUGH.  (This solution included several steps, but the real key to my solution involved using the community for outreach and involvement in ensuring animal rights).  As I work in an animal shelter, this issue hits very close to home to me.  Plus, it was easy to get all of the information that I needed to be specific.  My passion came through, and that heart-wrenching story about the basset hound we found in shock would have gotten to any reader.

In my persuasive paper, I focused on the importance of spaying or neutering your pets.  This issue was, of course, very much connected with the topic of my letter to the editor.  Animal abuse and neglect would be greatly lessened if there weren’t so many unwanted puppies and kittens being born to people who can’t take care of them and don’t wish to do so.  I opened up the paper with a series of questions, which I think helped catch the readers’ attention.  And I had a great number of facts such as the current stats–local and nation–regarding unwanted pets and annual pet birth rates.

My weakest paper was the summary and critical response.  I hated that article!  As a result, I fould it very difficult to remain objective in the summary, and I found it hard to keep myself from just going off on a rant against the author in the critical response.  I wanted to keep including words that gave away my position in the summary (such “As the author tries to argue . . ” or “The last point in her useless rant . . . “).  These were inappropriate, of course, so I had to edit them out. And, as I mentioned, in the critical response, I wanted to just talk about how much I disagreed rather than focusing on whether or not the article was successful as a piece of writing.

According to our syllabus, this course is designed to teach us how to compose purposeful writing as well as the nature of argumentation, critical thinking, and persuasive writing in particular.  The course taught me all of those things, but it also taught me something else.  This course taught me that I can be a successful writer and that persuasive writing skills are going to continue to be important for me–in other classes, in my career, and in my personal life in my community.

Words are, indeed, powerful tools.  Thanks for teaching me how to use them.

Sincerely,

John Banks

Formatting Basics:  In terms of formatting, 1-inch margins, 12-point Times New Roman font, and double-spacing are the basics that are generally preferred in academic writing.   It is also helpful to indent the first line of each new paragraph.  In terms of the program you use to save your work, Microsoft Word is preferred, but please just let me know if you have questions about other acceptable programs.