Unpacking a Standard

Unpacking a Standard

Educational common core standards are an important aspect of teaching.  Standards help show what students should know and should be able to do in a certain subject. The Common Core State standards of California were developed by the State Board of Education. In California, almost all states have adopted the same English and Math standards, so that when students switch schools or states they can still receive a good education. As a first year teacher, I teach K5 Special education at Tolenas Elementary in California. I am required to follow the State standards of English and Math. The Common Core State standards for English  and math are true for  Kindergarten through high school.


Standards help prepare students for college and the workforce. I chose to develop lessons in math and English based on the common core State standards, as well as it is my job as a teacher to develop lessons that will teach students correct content for English and math. For the K-12 standards, students are expected to learn subject area content by the end of the year, with a cumulative progression designed to  enable students to reach college and career readiness no later than by the time they reach high school.
For the English common core standard the main idea is for students to develop reading, writing, speaking and listening skills.  Student’s should be able to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and summarize information and ideas to conduct original research to answer questions or solve problems, and to analyze and create a high volume and extensive range of print and nonprint texts in media forms old and new. As far as reading, it’s is imperative that students show a steadily growing ability to discern more from and to make fuller use of text, make an increasing number of connections among ideas and between texts, consider a wider range of textual evidence, and become more sensitive to inconsistencies, ambiguities, and poor reasoning in texts. For writing, it is expected that students draw upon and write about evidence from literary and informational texts. For listening skills, students are expected to learn to work together, listen carefully to ideas, be able to integrate information from oral, visual, quantitative, and media sources, evaluate what they hear, use media and visual displays strategically to help achieve communicative purposes, as well as adapt speech to context and task.

English Common Core State standards can be found at this link :

https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/finalelaccssstandards.pdf

An example of the English Common Core State standards activity is using a 5 step process to comprehend a text and read with purpose. The objective of this lesson is to get students in my K5 Special Ed class to comprehend a text and read with purpose. The five step reading process has five steps. Those five steps are 1. Prepare 2.  Preview 3. Predict 4. Paraphrase 5. Picture. In this activity students will prepare for the story by asking themselves questions such as 1. Is there too much background noise? 2. Can I see what I’m reading? 3. Are there too many distractions? Once students complete step one of the reading process, step two includes previewing the text to warm up the brain. Previewing the text allows for students to pay special attention to titles and subtitles,  introduction and conclusion, bolded and underlined words, review pictures and headings, and also review end of the chapter questions before reading in order to look for the answers while reading. The third step of this reading process is the prediction process. After previewing the text, students can begin making predictions about what they will learn in the text, based on what they already know from previewing the text. The final steps of the 5 step process in reading are paraphrase and picture. These final steps allow the reader to transform what they’ve learned into a mental image that is relatable and memorable by paraphrasing information into language that students can understand better. With picture, by making a visual of what you’ve read by drawing a picture about the story, helps for students to understand the text and read with purpose. This lesson activity helps students understand what they are reading while still following common core standards.

Math Common Core Standards are designed to Prepare students to graduate from high school and enter college and be prepared to join the workforce. These standards for math include eight mathematical practice standards. The eight mathematical practice standards include: 1. Make sense of problems and persevere  in solving them 2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively 3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others 4. Model with mathematics 5. Use appropriate tools strategically 6. Attend to precision 7. Look for and make use of structure 8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning. These standards are a balanced combination of procedures and understanding. As I have only four students in my special education class, three students are in 3rd grade. For this grade level, students are expected to know operations and algebraic thinking, practice numbers and operations in base ten, numbers and operations of fractions,  practice measurement and data, as well as geometry.

This a link to mathematics common core standards :

https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/ccssmathstandardaug2013.pdf

  I will be focusing on 3rd grade level instruction for this math common core standards example. For this lesson plan activity, the objective is to get students to use place value to read numbers from left to right. By the end of this activity lesson, students should be able when writing numbers to first determine the place value of the first digit, and then write the number. For this class activity, I will write on the board a problem about a man named John who decided to count what grew in his garden. We will begin by counting as a class single digit numbers, two digit numbers, three digit numbers, four digit numbers, five digit numbers, and six digit numbers. Lastly, as a class we will begin writing numbers by determining the place value of the first digit, and then writing the rest of the numbers accordingly. By using place value to read numbers from left to right, students will be able to correctly write letters.

In conclusion, Common Core State standards for English and Math are generally the same for almost all states. It is a teacher’s job to follow these standards when teaching, and a school’s job to ensure that the teacher is following State standards. These standard prepare students for academic growth, as well as prepare them for college, and to enter the work force after high school.


Resources:

Common Core Resources for Special Education. (2017, February). Retrieved December 23, 2017, from https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/cc/

Common Core State Standards. (n.d.). Retrieved December 23, 2017, from https://www.cde.ca.gov/re/cc/

Special Education - CalEdFacts. (n.d.). Retrieved December 23, 2017, from https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/sr/cefspeced.asp