MYP unit planner

Unit title
/
Going to a Festival
Teacher(s) / Jean Goulet
Subject and grade level / English B, Phase 3
Time frame and duration / 6 periods of 60 minutes
Stage 1: Integrate significant concept, area of interaction and unit question
Area of interaction focus
Which area of interaction will be our focus?
Why have we chosen this? / /
Significant concept(s)
What are the big ideas? What do we want our students to retain for years into the future?
Community and service
Awareness & Understanding: Students will research different festivals around the world.
Reflection: Students will choose a festival abroad. They will analyse and discuss its roots.
Action: Students will create a presentation of the festival to their peers. This presentation will enable other students to discover various cultures in the world. / Festivals are representative of a community and its culture.
MYP unit question
How can festivals help me teach others about various communities and their culture?
Assessment
What task(s) will allow students the opportunity to respond to the unit question?
What will constitute acceptable evidence of understanding? How will students show what they have understood?
  • Students will describe an international festival to their peers.
  • Students will have to present the origins of a festival and the values and beliefs it conveys.
  • Students will communicate their research using visual support.

Which specific MYP objectives will be addressed during this unit?
A Oral communication
• understand and respond to spoken texts
• communicate information containing relevant ideas and some detail in familiar and some unfamiliar situations
• request and provide information in familiar and some unfamiliar situations
• use language appropriate to a limited range of interpersonal and cultural contexts, and for a limited range of purposes and audiences
• use appropriate register in formal and informal oral communication
• use language accurately
• interact in rehearsed and unrehearsed exchanges using comprehensible pronunciation and intonation/correct tone.
Which MYP assessment criteria will be used?
Criterion A
Stage 2: Backward planning: from the assessment to the learning activities through inquiry
ContentWhat knowledge and/or skills (from the course overview) are going to be used to enable the student to respond to the unit question?
What (if any) state, provincial, district, or local standards/skills are to be addressed? How can they be unpacked to develop the significant concept(s) for stage 1?
Methodology (presentation rules, stage presence)
English (sentence structure, articulation, clarity of message)
ICT in research and presentation
C1 - oral communication
C2 – understanding and reinvestment of texts
Approaches to learning
How will this unit contribute to the overall development of subject-specific and general approaches to learning skills?
  • Organization: manage time during research; structure the presentation.
  • Collaboration: work in groups (use proper strategies).
  • Communication: be informed and inform others on a festival.
  • Information literacy: access information on the Internet.
  • Thinking: prioritize the information that has to be shared with other students.
  • Transfer: share knowledge with other students.

Learning experiencesHow will students know what is expected of them? Will they see examples, rubrics, templates?
How will students acquire the knowledge and practise the skills required? How will they practise applying these?
Do the students have enough prior knowledge? How will we know?
Collaborative learning
Project based learning
Active learning/listening
Efficient use of language
Using resources
Problem solving
Students have to break up into teams of four or five.
Each student of the team has to find an existing festival outside the province.
Students research the origins of the festival.
Students discuss how they will explain the origins of the festival in a class presentation.
The team has to structure the presentation in order for other students to understand the roots of the festival.
Students find a way to teach others about the values and beliefs of the inhabitants of a region through their festival using visual support.
Resources
What resources are available to us?
How will our classroom environment, local environment and/or the community be used to facilitate students’ experiences during the unit?
  • Teacher material (task description, rubric)
  • Computer Lab (research)
  • Travel agencies
  • English dictionaries
  • English/French dictionaries
  • Thesaurus

Ongoing reflections and evaluation
In keeping an ongoing record, consider the following questions. There are further stimulus questions at the end of the “Planning for teaching and learning” section of MYP: From principles into practice.
Students and teachersWhat did we find compelling? Were our disciplinary knowledge/skills challenged in any way?
What inquiries arose during the learning? What, if any, extension activities arose?
How did we reflect—both on the unit and on our own learning?
Which attributes of the learner profile were encouraged through this unit? What opportunities were there for student-initiated action?
Possible connections How successful was the collaboration with other teachers within my subject group and from other subject groups?
What interdisciplinary understandings were or could be forged through collaboration with other subjects?
Assessment
Were students able to demonstrate their learning?
How did the assessment tasks allow students to demonstrate the learning objectives identified for this unit? How did I make sure students were invited to achieve at all levels of the criteria descriptors?
Are we prepared for the next stage?
Data collection
How did we decide on the data to collect? Was it useful?
  • Students like to learn about other communities. They can discover other religions, values, and ancient tales.
  • Another aspect that can be added to the project is to make the students plan the entire trip (e.g. flight, hotel, car rental reservation). It is important to give the students a realistic budget in case you want them to book a flight.

SÉBIQ Unit planner committee 2012 - 2013