Curriculum Plan Reflection

Creating the curriculum plan was the most challenging project for me this semester in math methods. It required the most amount of time, effort, and thinking. Although challenging, I can truly say this has been the project that I have taken the most away from. Organizing the different domain areas to be covered in each quarter was not very difficult for my group and I, nor were writing the objectives for each quarter. The challenging part was creating unique, interactive modeling and exploration tasks for the students to participate in within each grade. Additionally, creating the end of the semester exploration activities was a difficult task for us. However, I believe that my group members and I did an excellent job of coming up with unique activities for each grade level. This curriculum plan turned out so well, I would be more than comfortable using it in my own K-2 mathematics classroom one day! I feel that I learned a lot throughout the process of creating the curriculum plan. I realized how important it is for material to build off each other in each of the grade levels. It is to the benefit of both teachers and students to create curriculum plans for series of grade levels. This ensures that there is little overlap, and that teachers are maximizing on using students' prior knowledge. Although curriculum plans take a great amount of planning and time, they really can be beneficial to implement in a school.

After viewing the curriculum plans for both 3rd-5th and 6th-8th grades, it was interesting to see the flow of content and domains between the bands of grade levels. K-5th grades are very similar in domains, with the content obviously differing by grade level. However, once students reach 6th grade, the domains are changed quite a bit and become much more difficult and higher-level. Additionally, the measurement and data domain is completely eliminated in the upper grades (6-8). My assumption is that measurement and data is simply combined with geometry in these grades levels, and does not necessarily need its own domain area. I did see some overlap within the grade levels and bands, but I do not believe that this overlap is unnecessary. Actually, I think that some overlap (especially of difficult concepts) can be very beneficial to students. It just means that students are covering similar material in multiple grade levels, which can serve as a very good review. I also thought it was interesting that while most of the content domains changed every few grade levels, one domain was present throughout all grade levels. This domain is geometry. Geometry is heavily emphasized in each of the K-8 standards. It is clear that this is a highly important domain, and that students should be well experienced in geometry by the time they reach the upper grade levels.