What a week! Being thrown off the high dive into the deep end of the school pool, that was me this week. We had a week long professional development about a new method of lesson planning. I was so nervous going into my first pd as a new teacher. I had butterflies and didn't sleep the night before. While I have been a sub, and worked in almost everyone's rooms, it was different being one of the team. Finding someone to sit next to, wanting to participate but not too much, finding someone to eat lunch with, UGH it was rough.

One thing that helped to sooth my nerves was the class itself. It was a very challenging workshop and EVERYONE struggled. There's nothing like having to pull together as a team to figure out something completely new and foreign. We were learning all about Literacy Design Collaboratives. This process is a whole new way of thinking and planning units and lesson plans. You can learn more here. 

LDC modules are a way to plan for what the student will leave your lesson knowing. It is almost backwards thinking when planning your lessons. The LDC website walks you through each step of the planning, forcing the teacher to really plan out, think about and ensure each aspect of a lesson is meaningful for the students. LDC forces incorporation of reading and writing skills into my subjects, science and social studies. This is what I loved about the format once I figured everything out. 

What I did learn from the workshop is that I am on my own teaching science and social studies. There are absolutely no resources available in these subjects for the district. There is no curriculum in place, no text books, no reading materials, no maps etc. It is up to me to create the entire year's plan and materials from scratch.  This is proving to be very challenging. I am finding that using Keynote and Powerpoint are going to be my go to for lesson presentation. I like that I can print off outlines from the presentation creating my resources for the students. Teachers Pay Teachers is also giving my credit card quite the workout. 

I am trying out google classroom to see if it will help with organizing some of the things I am able to find and use. Once I get little more familiar with how classroom works, I will be sure to blog about it here.

Here's to creating a whole new curriculum and hoping to NOT have to redo things for next year!!