Beginning the Planning Process

Headed into school on Tuesday to do what I could about planning for next year.  I suppose more than anything else it was a way of calming the nerves and being able to assure myself I’m doing something productive simply because I left the house with the laptop and went there!

After spending some time throwing away more useless paper (and filing the occasional useful piece) and doing some more work on re-vamping both the school’s website and Intranet, my mind started to play on me again, reminding me of my main purpose: “so what exactly are you going to do this term?”

Finding no easy way of putting it in front of me to see, I turned to the classroom whiteboard and starting setting out the key learning areas, units and what could be done.  The idea is to take the Living in Communities integrated unit (HSIE and Science & Technology) and use it as a context for learning in other KLAs as much as possible (Creative Arts and English start to get a go).

The main learning experience for the term appears to be starting to structure itself around students planning to build an imaginary community.  We used a bit of the old classic Sim City software in this same unit last year and thought we could take it a step further.

All the “LT”s in orange on the board also show where I’ve come up with ways that technology could be embedded into the learning process.  It started with the idea of “well, let’s get on to Google Earth and find our piece of empty land in the local area and use it to start building on”.  It’s snowballing a bit from there.

We’re certainly not expecting plans that would be sumitted to a surveyor general’s department or anything like that.  The idea is that in having to put together their own community, they’ll need to take a look at what makes their real community tick, and incorporate those features (and those learnings) into their new one.

There are still two KLAs I don’t have a starting point for yet.  Religious Education may prove too difficult to integrate at this point, at least with the units set in their current scope and sequence.

Now I need to get the learning sequence organised so that the students can acutally tackle it head-on.