This unit was a week long study about identity. Students in 6th grade worked one part of the lesson structure a day. I used the Slip-In-Slide Add-On for Google Slides to send out the next slide each evening. This allowed me to properly scaffold the unit for students throughout the week.
Once I have established my learning criteria, success criteria, and relevance for students and families, I also take the time to think about the essential question that I want students to answer at the end of the unit.
How does understanding our identity impact our relationships with others?
Then, I separate learning tasks using a variation of the 5E Instructional Model.
1. Discover Identity - We used a variety of resources (instructional read aloud, commonlit articles - student choice, collaborative discourse on Jamboard) to understand what identity is and who identity impacts through the process of crafting a statement to explain what identity is.
2. Explore Identity - We continued to explore (interactive read aloud, commonlit articles - student choice, and creative reflection about ourselves) what identity truly is and how it connects to our own lives, as well as why it is important to understand the elements that create a person's unique identity.
Surface characteristics were given time for consideration before diving deeper into our own identities the next day. Students thought about their family dynamics, siblings, things they liked or disliked, etc. They used a Graphic Organizer that I purchased pre-made.
3. Reflect & Apply - After spending two days learning about different characteristics of identity, we began to apply this thinking to ourselves. Students completed a reflection sheet that went deeper than the creative reflection the day before. Then, students took their understanding of themselves and their identity from these activities and created their own identity web using Google Drawings.
Students worked in Google Docs to reflect deeper about their individual identity factors.
Then students used Google Drawings to create their own identity web after looking at my (rather simple) example. In fact, students identity webs included more visuals and creativity to express themselves. I modeled for students how to add images to a drawing, crop with shapes, insert word art, and change color and resize images and words.
4. Share - Students shared their identity webs on Google Classroom using the Discussion Question format. Students viewed each others identity webs and looked for similarities and differences. They engaged in polite (and sometimes excited!) discourse about ways they are alike or different.
Here is a small snippet of one conversation between two girls in different classes!
5. Extend - Students took time to respond to the essential question: How does understanding our identity impact our relationships with others? Students used a graphic organizer for the strategy TIDE (Topic Introduction, Important Evidence, Detailed Examination, and End) and then composed a well-written paragraph in response to the prompt. Students used text evidence to support their thinking.
Supporting students with sentence frames.
Example response from a student:
Reflection
Overall this unit was highly successful. Each day students provided good feedback on how they felt working through the unit and instructional activities. Student writing provided great insight into how effective students were in learning the content and making connections to their own lives for relevancy. The hardest struggle was having students share their links with accurate share settings. Next instructional unit, I am just going to have them share their work as part of the Google Classroom assignment, so they have one less thing to try to understand how to do.
Credits to Slidesmania's For Edu by Edu template design! I used the theme found here to design my own instructional slide deck for students.
