Reflections of an Interdisciplinary Lesson Plan

 I implemented a digitally supported interdisciplinary virtual lesson with five students selected by a fourth grade teacher at Britton Elementary, and are students that needed to be challenged in literacy learning. These are my experiences and reflections after four lessons.

 

Lesson One

We started by watching a read aloud on YouTube of Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. In my original lesson plan, I planned to include Thunder Cake and Thank You, Mr. Falker (also by Patricia Polacco), but decided to omit the second book and later add Chicken Sunday. The lesson objectives were to talk about the story of Thunder Cake and discuss family stories and the definition of folklore. I explained that the students would be creating their own story on Story Jumper in response to the two books. T. Overall, they made more connections with the synopsis of the story than the illustrations, and noticed details in the text without noting anything about the drawings until I asked questions about the style of illustration. I explained that Patricia Polacco often told stories about her childhood, her family, and other members of her community that made an impact on her and used a mix of loose and sketchy pencil drawings with an overlay of expressive colors. One very interesting observation from Student 1 when I asked what they noticed about the illustrations: “I think the color of the cake is the color of mud because it started raining and it was muddy outside”.

 

Lesson Two

This was a 30 minute lesson where all five students were present, so we read/listened to Thunder Cake again to catch up the fifth student, and I also decided to add Chicken Sunday. In my original plan, I was going to have the students draw/paint physical illustrations with paper and art materials (preferably colored pencils), but moving to virtual learning made that less attainable. I decided to focus on the Oklahoma Fine Arts Standard of Responding/Critiquing for illustrations in the two books. The students gave their synopsis of what they noticed in both these books during this time. 

Thunder Cake- The grandmother taught the girl to count down from ten every mile when they went to get each ingredient for the cake; they gathered the ingredients from different places instead of the store; you could see the sky get gray in the background when the thunder started happening; the illustrations were colorful. 

Chicken Sunday- One student noticed the fact that on one page of the story, the background illustration of the grandmother’s dining room shows family pictures, which are real photographs edited into the drawing. We made the connection that the author did this to show how real the story was of her past. In these two lessons, the students did an overall good job of paying attention to details in both the stories, and made progress noticing the significance of illustrations based on their verbal responses.

 

Lesson Three

This lesson was an hour long, and was difficult primarily because it took almost half the time to get the kids logged into Story Jumper, and adding them to my classroom on the website. I had to omit Bubbl.us, which I believe made the overall lesson suffer because there was no paper trail of the verbal observations the kids had that they could keep track of. However, I knew I had limited time and wanted them to develop their stories. At this point, only three students were in the group, one of which could not use Story Jumper and instead began writing her story on paper. I explained in each lesson that they should write a story about them and their family members, or members of their community. The students figured out how to use Story Jumper very easily, finding the title page and creating their characters. One student began writing a fairy tale (Student 4), while another wrote about the twelve days of Christmas (Student 1). They were very engaged with Story Jumper, and found it very easy to use and easy to incorporate themselves into their story with relevant images and backgrounds to accompany it.

Student 1's story of the Twelve Days of Christmas:

 

Lesson Four

This was an hour-long lesson as well, and for the first time, all five students were present. Student 5 (who was new to Story Jumper, not being present in the third lesson) began writing his story about a time that his family “almost got robbed” (picture below). This time was used solely to work on their stories, and engagement levels were high with Student 1, Student 2 (present virtually using a phone and writing her story on paper), Student 4, and Student 5. Student 3 did not make much progress this day, and only ended up finishing the title page. This was the last lesson that I had time for, and I asked them how they liked the overall experience. They all had a positive response and said that they thought Story Jumper was fun (except for Student 3, who said she enjoyed both the stories and the opportunity to write her own). I told them to continue working on their stories, and that everyone in the group on Story Jumper could view one another’s stories. Overall, they demonstrated that they understood story structure and communicating their messages using both text and digital illustrations.

Student 5's story of an almost robbery:

Final Reflections on the PEDDL Framework

Strengths and weaknesses:
The PEDDL framework is an excellent tool to support interdisciplinary literacy. The questions in the framework lend themselves particularly well to literary analysis, student responses to artwork, and understanding why authors tell stories and choose styles of illustrations to express emotions and themes. Digitally supported disciplinary literacy was fostered by the use of Story Jumper, largely because of the enthusiastic engagement of the students towards the application, but also because of listening to YouTube read-alouds, and being able to do so in their own environment (with no physical distractions from classmates). It is difficult to find a weakness with the framework itself, or the digital tools that I used (though I cannot say for sure the effectiveness of Bubbl.us). I did think that the connection between the stories we read and the work that I expected the students to do was broken because I ran out of time to use Bubbl.us, and if we had used it, the themes of their stories would have been more pertinent to the content of both the Patricia Polacco stories.

What I learned about myself as a teacher:

I learned that I need to spend more time creating examples so that students can more easily know the direction that I would like their work to take. It took them no time at all to learn how to use Story Jumper (mainly because it is very easy and exciting to explore), but if I had created my own story and presented it, they would have had a rubric to follow, and I believe they would have gotten more accomplished. I do think, however, that the issue of logging them on to the application was a long, but unavoidable experience, but I will become more proficient about not taking up as much time with technology hangups. I will also need to develop my assessment strategies more thoroughly. As my very first experience with virtual teaching, however, I think it went well.

 

What I learned about supporting digital and multimodal literacies in a classroom:

My takeaway from using both traditional texts (storybooks written 25-30 years ago) and fairly new websites to create stories was generally a positive experience for the students. They could both read and hear the books, and could use paper and pencil and digital illustrations to express their stories. As students who were included in my group of students that need to be challenged, this combination of tools was an excellent way to engage them and deepen their learning.

 

Suggestions for others:

I recommend the PEDDL framework and the three applications I used/planned to use (Story Jumper, Bubbl.us, YouTube read alouds) for disciplinary literacy. Even though teachers do not exactly have spare time, taking time to explore and evaluate different websites and apps for students is a fun experience, and will inspire ideas for deepening learning for students that need challenging. Taking time to teach students how to use technology in an academic way is an ongoing process, because they pick it up quickly, but need to be refocused often. It is definitely worth the effort.