Main Body
A collection of lesson plans for grades 4-8 based on picture books dealing with social justice. The lessons focus on Literacy but many also connect across subjects to Social Studies (geography and history), Health, the Arts, or Science & Technology
This project is released under creative commons 4.0 share-alike.
This project is made possible with funding by the Government of Ontario and through eCampusOntario’s support of the Virtual Learning Strategy (VLS) and Central Virtual Learning Platform (CVLP). To learn more about VLS and CVLP visit: https://vls.ecampusontario.ca.
INTRODUCTION
On the most basic level this text is a compendium of social justice lesson plans for classroom teachers of grades 4-8. Each lesson is based on a picture book that deals with an aspect of equity or diversity. The lesson plans have been developed by teacher education students at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. We welcome you to use and adapt any of the exciting ideas presented in over 50 plans that cover at least 9 areas of social justice. Each lesson plan has been vetted by course instructors and is aligned with Ontario curriculum documents.
Lessons in Edition 1.0 were based on expectations in the 2006 Language document. Edition 2.0 has 25 of the lesson plans converted to the 2023 document by teacher candidates in my Language Arts class at Brock University. These are indicated with an asterisk in the Table of Contents
BACKGROUND
This project is part of an initiative to foster Connected Educators (Nussbaum-Beach & Ritter Hall, 2012) in the two-year Teacher Education Program. Students in the Junior/Intermediate Language Arts courses focus in Year One on becoming critical curators of digital resources for teaching Language Arts in grades 4-10. They learn to access online resources from sources such as educational blogs, podcasts, websites, and Ministry of Education support documents. These are shared and critiqued within their class on the Learning Management System and discussed in small face-to-face groups during weekly Professional Learning Conversations. Each student selects an online curation tool to save and organize the many resources gathered over the term.
In Year Two, the focus shifts from curating teaching resources to creating them. One assignment is to select a picture book that deals with an aspect of social justice, plan a lesson that could be used in Ontario classrooms, and share the plan with their classroom colleagues using the Brock Teacher Education lesson plan format (see Appendix A). They are then invited to reach beyond the immediate Brock classroom and contribute to a world-wide audience of educators through Open Access Publishing. The lesson plans of students who have given written permission are included in this anthology Appendix C.
Over the two-year period teacher candidates begin to develop Personal Learning Networks to take with them as they begin their teaching careers. They not only become critical users of resources create