Unit vs. Lesson Planning

   I had a lot of prior experience writing lesson plans from my previous education courses, but I had never written a unit plan until this semester. Unit planning is a big part of what teachers do, and good planning leads to success in the classroom for all, so it's vital that a teacher has good unit plans going into the school year. Unit plans are long and take a lot of work to prepare, but they are so worth it. A unit plan is comprised of a bunch of different types of lesson plans, all about the same topic. 

   The key to a good unit plan is having a variety of teaching styles and resources within the unit so that every student has the best chance to succeed. You can't have a unit plan filled with only direct or inquiry-based lessons; that is not enough of a variety. Unit plans should also contain a lot of technology for the students to explore and learn with. In this generation of technologically based learners, having a plethora of resources for students to access and use is crucial. To not have this in your unit plan would be a detriment to students in your classroom. A unit plan has an overall goal and objective for the unit, and also has individual objectives and goals for each lesson in the unit to get to the end goal. It's important to keep reminding yourself what the overall objective of the unit is while making the individual lessons. All of the lessons in the unit need to get the students closer to the big goal of the unit. Something else that must be included in a unit plan is a culminating activity at the end. There should be some sort of project or assignment that students have to complete based on a rubric to show that they met the unit goal by the end. This assignment could be something as simple as a test, but I'm going to try to be more creative than that! I'm going to use fun projects where the students can show that they mastered the content in a fun, creative way. Unit planning isn't easy, but it's a vital part of teaching. Students need good, structured units to really shine in the classroom. If you want to check out my unit plan for this semester, the link is here! My unit is about botany and plants in general, check it out!