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Process

In a recent Professional Development day, you were introduced to three phases involved in the planning and teaching of lessons.

These three phases include:

This WebQuest will guide you through activities targetting the first two of these three phases. In other words, we will help to provide you with resources for the integration of ICT into the planning, instruction and student learning phases.

Below you will find an example of how ICT may be integrated into the development of a thematic unit.

Chocolate Thematic Unit

A thematic unit centred around something as simple as chocolate could contain classroom activities related to mathematics, language arts, social studies and science (and likely other subjects).

ICT in Planning:

Before planning any teaching unit, thematic or otherwise, it is important to consult the Saskatchewan Learning Curriculum Guides. You can go directly to the Saskatchewan Evergreen Curriculum or, if you would like to learn more about the Evergreen Curriculum and related resources, check out Preservice Module #1 from iTeacherEd.

Also, you may want to look for thematic units that have already been developed. For instance, the popular site AtoZTeacherStuff.com has a wealth of technology resources tied together by themes. Or, if you are having trouble understanding what thematic units are, you can find many online articles regarding the creation and benefit of thematic units such as this article hosted at eduplace.

There are also many unit and lesson plan repositories available. The Educators Reference Desk (formerly AskEric), Microsoft Lesson Plans and BlueWeb'n are great places to start for lesson ideas and resources. One of my favorite places to find theme ideas is this link from the Saskatchewan East School Division.

For teachers wanting to get better acquainted with chocolate in general, and all that goes with it, you may want to check out Chocolate: The Exhibition.

Or if you want to try another approach, you certainly could do well trying a popular search engine such as Google. Typing in "thematic unit chocolate" into a Google search will get you these results. You may be amazed at the volume of resources available. However, with a closer scrutiny, you may feel a bit dissapointed. Trial and error is often the key.

ICT in Instruction:

After visiting a few lesson plan sites and conducting Google searches, resources should begin to appear. For instance:

For Math Instruction:
A quick search of Knowledge Network Explorer revealed several lesson aids.
- M & M Sort is a worksheet and activity developed by teacher Karen Tobler to introduce basic statistics to K-3 students.
- Hershey Fractions reinforces fractional concepts through the use of the Hershey Candy bar. The candy bar is divided into many individual squares and this is useful for students to divide it into fractional parts.

For Language Arts Instruction:
There is excellent literature that could be included in a Chocolate Thematic Unit. For instance, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl or Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmel Smith would be good choices for young readers. Or for older readers, the Chocolate War by Robert Cormier may be a good choice. There are dozens of resources for novel studies for each, and you can click any of the previous links for good examples. Be sure, however, to consult the Saskatchewan Learning curriculum recommended bibliographies before using texts in the classroom.

Also, here is a short bibliography of other chocolate-related reads.

For Social Studies:
A lesson regarding the Mapping of Chocolate Factories could be an interesting approach that could benefit both Math (coordinates) and Social Studies (mapping) objectives.
And here's an excellent site that details the history of chocolate.

For Science:
The Sweet Science of Chocolate website features some excellent ideas on how to use the concept of chocolate in the science classroom.
Chocolate Chip Cookie Mining provides ideas for a useful problem solving game related to science and other subject areas.

ICT in Student Activities:

As you have seen, the theme Chocolate can be used in many different subject areas. In support of some of the lessons ideas above, here are some additional websites that can be used in the Student Activities phase of unit planning.

As you can see, there is an amazing wealth of information which can be drawn from such a simple theme.There are hundreds of other sites available that could support the integration of technology into such a unit. Use the resources in the next section to help get you started in the process of finding your own ideas for your proposed unit.