Early Learning and Development

Introduction
Creating a developmentally appropriate lesson plan, or study topic, is crucial to your success as an early childhood educator. You are provided with a lesson plan form that is attached for you to complete. Lesson plan should always be based on age and developmentally appropriate developmental indicators, not the interests of the teacher. Think about using themes or topics that you know the children are interested in, and be specific.  Transportation is too broad, but wheels is a narrowed focus that would be appropriate.  Pigs, flowers, fire trucks, rain, etc. are examples of topics that children would be familiar with.  (Holidays, shapes, letters, etc. are not acceptable topics).
The Assignment
Your key assessment contains 2 parts to the assignment.
Part 1: You will prepare a week long study topic (lesson plan) for preschool children ages 3 – 5 years. (This is the same format that you have seen in other EDU courses and will use in your practicum course EDU 284.) In your previous module, you did activity plans for a variety of age groups, where you incorporated activities and ideas with a specific topic- you can certainly pull from that prior learning as a foundation for this key assessment. (For example: if you had a specific math activity that you included on your module 6 activity plan, you can incorporate that into your centers, whole group or small group)
Using the forms provided, develop a week long study topic (lesson plan) for children ages 3 – 5 years.
The plan must contain:

a developmentally appropriate topic of study
a minimum of 3 family involvement suggestions
detailed activities for the week and contain appropriate developmental indicators from the NC Foundations for Early Learning and Development  (be sure to understand the difference between a goal and an indicator.  Indicators are more specific and are required for the lesson plan)
a variety of curriculum areas: Math, Social Studies, Science, Literacy, etc.
extension activities for at least 2 of the days

Part 2: You will include a summary/implementation paragraph that pulls together and connects the information you have included from your plans.  For this implementation piece, minimum of 7 sentences, you will discuss the connections between the topic you chose, your whole group activities and a center of your choosing.  You will choose a learning center, from your changes to environment form, and discuss how that specific center supports your topic and the activities that you are doing during whole group.

How do the materials support the topic and the activities from whole group? (the materials were listed on your changes to the environment form)
What activities will the children do in the center?
What skills are they working on?

Grading Criteria
The rubric is attached, please review before submitting to ensure you have met all the criteria.
Review the Statement on Plagiarism, and Citation Guidelines.
Resources
Use the attached forms to complete the assignment.
Use our textbook and NCFELD to complete the documentsFor more information on Early Learning and Development check on this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_childhood