Horsin' Around

I had the opportunity to write my very first unit plan for an Equine Science course that I will be teaching in the Spring! I thought this was going to be an easy assignment since I love planning and organizing; however I found myself taking a bunch of time on this assignment and it turned out to be rather difficult. My original goal with this unit plan was to cover introductory topics of equine science and dive into a little bit of everything. As I started looking at the Pa academic and ag standards I started putting them all down as standards I wanted to use because I thought they would cover good information. I very quickly discovered that in a three week unit it is impossible to cover all the standards I had wrote down. This required me to get more specific and think about what exactly I wanted to teach and how I was going to teach the information. It also made me think about the flow of topics. What was the best order to teacher the variety of topics I wanted to cover? After creating my first draft I got some good feedback from my peers about how I can best organize the content and improvements I can make. First and foremost, my peer reviewers pointed out that I needed to include my daily objectives. Somehow I forgot my daily objectives (kind of a big deal). I think maybe I was getting standards, unit goals and daily objectives confused. As we talked about these subjects in class they became more clear to me and I was able to apply this knowledge to my final draft. There were a few formatting issues that I resolved as well. Other than that the other content was all included!

For my final draft I used many of these suggestions from my peers and created a final project with many revisions.. First, I took an idea from the person's that I peer reviewed. She created a flow chart of what standards, objectives and essential questions would be used on what days during the course. I created my own format like hers and found that it was very helpful in keeping everything organized. I plan to use this format for all of my other unit plans. I have also added all of the daily objectives that I will need everyday. These changes have definitely improved my unit plan as a whole and I am grateful for the peers reviews that have helped me create a better final product.