It's a Wonderful Life!

I love Christmas time and everything it has to offer...including being done with my last project! Hopefully you have been reading my blog and keeping up with all the strategies I have been learning for Selection and Integration of Instructional Technologies. I have now taken all those strategies and placed them into one unit. I decided to do a unit on Balance and Motion for this assignment. While completing each part in a lesson/unit was fairly easy to visual, putting them all into one unit was a lot harder to visual. Needless to say I had to listen to a lot of Christmas music to keep me in the Christmas spirit:)


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Are your lessons universal?

Every student learns in a different way. In class we have been learning about Universal Design for Learning and how teachers can create an environment supported by UDL. Before looking at CAST UDL Lesson Builder, a website designed to help create a UDL environment, I thought I was doing a fairly good job teaching in a way that was meeting the needs of my learners. Of course reviewing the site gave me some new and fresh ideas, but I do a fairly decent job teaching in a variety of ways. The part that I need to work on the most in my classroom is creating multiple practices or independent work practices that have variety and allow the students to choose which method works best for them. This is something that I will keep in mind as I continue throughout the school year. I took a lesson that I teach each year regarding time to the nearest five minutes and adjusted it to make it more universal. Even though time is not a huge project, it is still something that is important for my second graders to learn. You can see my adapted lesson here and how I made it more universal. If there are any more ideas of what I can do with time I would be happy to
hear them.

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