BD Sharing Process

I am surprised at how much I enjoyed teaching my Backwards Design Unit.  Actually to be completely honest, when I was writing my lesson plan I wasn't thinking about the BIG idea as much as I was thinking how BIG of a pain in the butt that this was going to be.  However, my students (and I) had so much fun!  My big idea that I wanted my students to learn was the difference between fiction books and non-fiction books.  This was the first time that I've fully designed any lesson around a specific common core standard.  I decided to teach them about spiders (since all of my students believe in celebrating Halloween-and it’s quickly approaching I thought it would be a good fit!) See more of what we did in class by clicking HERE.

I checked out many, many, many books from the library (mostly non-fiction) coupled with my own “spider” library (mostly fiction) and was able to teach the difference between the two.  I have to admit that I learned a lot of interesting facts about spiders that I didn't know a week ago!  Maybe that was a good thing as my Little’s had a lot of questions about spiders that I didn't know the answers to.  We had wonderful journey learning together in a fun and exciting way that was mostly student driven!  It has opened my eyes on how to make learning even more fun.  I know that they learned the difference between fiction and non-fiction because they would specifically ask me to read a non-fiction book for our read aloud just so they could learn more interesting facts about spiders.  Through this process I learned a lot of different things about my children, for example, before we began our unit we completed a K-W-L chart about what we know about spiders.  Some of the children gave me facts and some gave me their opinions, which leads me to another BD lesson-one that I wasn't planning on until later in the year.  However, next week we will be learning about bats and the big idea will be learning the difference between fact and opinion. 

I have to say that I’m pretty proud about our love for non-fiction books in our classroom since teaching this unit.

After completing my BD unit, my questions are:

• how long should a BD unit typically take?
• how many different "Big Ideas" should be in a unit?