differentiated instruction

📖 Standard

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.6-8.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas clearly and efficiently.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.6-8.1 Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources.

⏰ Time

200 minutes (approximately 5 class periods)

📲 Technology Required

Students will use the Internet to find a minimum of 12 appropriate images to represent their topic. Students will need access to a device with Google Slides to create calendar.

📃 Summary

This lesson plan allows students to explore a topic of interest to create an informational calendar. Students are to pick a topic, include an image for each month, brief explanation and source for that image. At the end of the project, students perform a self-assessment.

📚 Lesson

Introduce Assignment to Students

Calendar Assignment

In this assignment, you will be creating a personalized calendar using Google slides. Your calendar must consist of a minimum of 13 pages an include the following:

A title slide with introduction of the topic.
A page for each month with:
1. An image related to your topic
2. Text explaining the image and its relationship to the topic.
3. A link to a source for the image and information on the page.

Presentation to Explain Modifying Template

Use this brief presentation to explain how to change the background on a slide and how to add images. It uses the 2022 calendar template as an example.

There are many, many Google Slides calendar templates you can find on the web. Many of these are great, some cost money, some are for 2021 and some have broken links. So, we added an example here that you, on the topic, “Indigenous”, that you can copy into your Google classroom and modify, just to make sure you would have a free template that is available and up to date. It uses a variety of methods of citing sources, from a simple web link in January to APA style in May.

The sample calendar as a PDF is found here.

Make a personalized gift

Janna Jensen, IT specialist from North Dakota, laminates each page in the calendar and binds the pages for a personalized gift from students to parents or other special people in their lives. If you have limited funds, you can just laminate the first and last page for durability, or skip lamination altogether if you don’t have a laminator.

If, like me, you don’t have a binding machine, you can just use a 3-hole punch and twist ties from cables or bags of bread. Ask the lunchroom staff to save some for you.

***My first time ever using a laminator.***

Make this assignment your own!

I highly recommend encouraging your students to improvise with this assignment. They can find another template on line, insert pages in between months so that each month has a large scale image at top – the possibilities are endless.

Assessment

Students perform a self-assessment shown below.

Self-assessment form as a Word document.
Self-assessment form as a PDF.