Exploring Standards-Based Lesson Plans

For this assignment, it was very hard for me to find a lesson plan that met majority of the developmental domains needed for my specific age group. Without using one of my own, I wanted to keep my main focus on Early Childhood Education. The lesson I did decide to use is intended for infant toddlers, who range from twelve to eighteen months. Its main focus is drawn toward snowflakes and the cold weather. Teachers gave their students a variety of activities to do in order to introduce new ideas that connect to their theme for the week. This includes many hands on activities as well as book readings and activities outside of the classroom.

Early learning curriculum includes nine different developmental domains. These nine domains are used as a building block in order to create lessons throughout the week, as well as creating observations of their student’s development. These domains are as following.

(Social Studies isn't pictured)

Several activities featured in this particular lesson meet majority of the nine domains. For example, “Looking at books of winter wonders” covers literacy, which isn’t listed, as well as language and cognitive, which is also referred to as approaches towards learning. “Hitting a beach ball” is listed as gross motor, but would be classified as physical since it requires the child to use their hands in order to hit an object. “Taking turns dropping table tennis balls into a jug” is listed under social emotional which is accurate. A add on to that specific domain is "interacting with peers," and that’s exactly what that entails. Lastly “Using white finger paint” is considered creative art, this allows the children to explore different art supplies and create whatever they’d like.

If I were to use this plan in my own classroom, I would first make sure I put different activities for each day, giving more opportunity to cover all domains throughout the week. I feel that my students would enjoy the activities listed, as well as the other activities that could be added. The one activity that could potentially be challenging for my group would be “taking turns dropping table tennis balls into a jug.” In the world of infant toddlers there is no such thing as “taking turns.” Although we may do our best to instill that type of play, it does get challenging at times. Another activity that stuck out was “playing with and molding white dough.” From experience I know that my students would love this. It's also a great fine motor activity, that in most cases, can keep children occupied, and engaged. 

http://www.angelsacademies.com/toddlers.html