Today I also explored on iTunes U the Inspiring Lesson Ideas. In this section there are 30 courses to look into! To get there all you have to do is open the iTunes U app, then click on the “For Educators” icon, then click “see all” for “Inspiring Lesson Ideas.” Then choose which ones you want to download and read!
In the Lessons for the Classroom series of courses created by Apple Distinguished Educators, each course shares a unique lesson, unit, or best-practice already in use by educators. These courses come with materials that are ready to implement in your own classroom! The series includes lessons from math, language arts, social studies, science, and arts & music, as well as some lessons for electives and professional development.
Here are three courses that looked interesting to me for using in the elementary classroom:
After reading the descriptions on these courses, I decided to download the one titled Retelling Story Elements and see what ideas it had to offer. This course is set to take around 5 weeks in which students will learn through many different assignments and projects the elements of a good story, the different parts of a story, and will get to create a retelling of their favorite book using these story elements.
In looking through this course I was surprised by just how many materials and examples were provided! From this course I learned some fun new ways to teach the story elements, such as letting students create illustrations to represent the different parts of the story and then having them match certain sentences from the story to their different pictures to show when they happened. I also watched an example of a first grader’s movie that she created where she drew pictures on her iPad and put those in order, then did a voiceover as she introduced us to the story, the main character, the setting, and explained the introduction, middle and resolution.
I can definitely see myself using this lesson, if not just parts of this lesson, to help me teach the story elements to my students. I really like the ideas she lays out for having students retell their favorite stories and then compiling all these presentations together at the end for the whole class to watch. I also liked her idea of creating character trading cards, because these can be hands on reminders for students with key facts about these characters from the books they have read.
Overall, I really recommend reading through this course on Retelling Story Elements because this is a skill that all students at every grade need to be able to understand how to do. Even though it is a lesson written for elementary, these ideas can be expanded upon for the older students as well. There are some really fun ideas that I am definitely going to keep in mind when teaching about literature! So check it out today and get in on these awesome free lessons, created by teachers & for teachers!