Curriculum Exemplars

Below, I have embedded some examples of curriculum materials I put together for my social science classes. Resources used to create these materials were sourced from multiple places, including Facing History and Ourselves, Learning for Justice, YouTube, Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), The DBQ project, the Library of Congress, and more.

These curriculum exemplars are from an Introductory Psych course (11th/12th), an AICE Psych course (11th/12th), and a World History I (prehistory–1500) course. One of these materials is a comparison of flood myths from various cultures in the world written for a high school-level sheltered language learner course.

In addition to curriculum materials created for social studies courses, I have also created curriculum materials for 6th and 8th grade Language Arts in alignment with the Common Core Standards. The major piece included is an example of a digital student writing notebook I developed for a 6th-grade Language Arts classroom utilizing Lucy Calkin’s curriculum for writing a personal narrative.

This material shows the variety of content and activities that students might access during a unit in my class. Students complete document analysis, writing, engaging activities to increase their understanding, case studies that incorporate diverse stories such as the experiences of women, connections to the present, and more.

This is an example of how student choice is prioritized in my class. Students in my Introductory Psychology class are able to show their understanding of core concepts in a variety of ways, allowing them to be assessed in a way that meets their needs. Specifically, students might be overwhelmed with projects or tests in another class; thus, they can select a less time-consuming format that still shows the new knowledge or skills they have mastered. Conversely, a student might feel stagnated creatively and choose to create a project that promotes this skill. While students might not love working on assignments or every topic at all times, we can increase their engagement by allowing them some autonomy and indviduality over their workload.

This activity was created in direct response to student request in my introduction to psychology class. True crime is somewhat of a phenomenon and I wanted to approach this carefully. I pulled materials from the FBI to help students explore how serial killers are profiled, as well as made an effort to encourage them to identify and respect the victims; this is often lacking in our society. We spoke critically about true crime as a phenomenon and this lesson produced wonderful, thoughtful work from students. A portion of these materials and main project tasks were inspired by another popular project, located here: https://www.bremertonschools.org/cms/lib/WA01001541/Centricity/Domain/222/Serial%20Killers%20Project%201415.pdf

This lesson was created in alignment with Virginia's SOL for World History I. The various maps were a hit with students and the discussion involved to uncover why the African Kingdoms were able to develop and maintain a substantial amount of power were fascinating.

This menu was created for a Dystopian Literature Circles unit for 8th grade language arts at an international school in Guatemala. These were provided to students during our book tasting activity to support them as they selected their books for the unit.

This was created to guide our student of Ancient China in a 9th grade World History I course in Virginia. Due to time factors, we did not have time to explore all of the fascinating contributions from Ancient China, so resources were mined and students were provided the opportunity to choose what they would study. I also recorded read-alouds for the religion sections to support those students with accommodations or who were language learners.

This was written to help students in a high school-level sheltered language learner course compare flood myths across multiple cultures. For the Virginia standard, students were looking at the influence of Mesopotamian beliefs on Judaism; however, as a world history course, we explored the existence of flood myths globally. Learners in this course were at the emerging and beginner level. This material was used to help students select the myths they were most interested in and identify similarities and differences between them.