"Every child deserves a champion – an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be."
InTASC Standard:
Standard #4: Content Knowledge
The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches and creates learning experiences that make these aspects of the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners to assure mastery of the content (InTASC, 2013).
Brief Description of Evidence:
During the spring semester of 2019 as part of my EDUC 233- Literacy Development Through Children’s Literature class, I had the opportunity to create my children's E-Book in which I was the author and illustrator of the book. The class was given many ideas on how to do this E-Book and tools that we could use. It could only be an electronic book. As the illustrator, I was able to choose how to make the illustrations for our book. The first thing I did was pick what topic I wanted to talk about, and then select the grade level I wanted to base my book from. I am a dog lover, so I decided to do my book about my dog. The name of my book is "A Day With Bailey". I wrote down on a piece of paper everything that my dog does in a day and wrote it from her point of view. I took pictures of her as my illustrations and then put them together in a story. I edited the images with an app on my phone and then put them together in Google Slides.
Analysis of What I Learned:
Through the process of preparing my Google Slides about my E-book, I learned about how important it is, for us as parents or family to try to teach our children how important it is to read. I learned how to use tools of inquiry by asking questions to relatives, gathering information from the internet, considering different alternatives on how to create my ebook, seeking out ways to find tools such as different platforms I could use for my ebook, and making a plan of action to know step by step how to arrange the pages inside my ebook so it would have a certain fluency. I also learned that Bloom’s Taxonomy is a great way to confirm I am giving children an ebook that portrays meaningful learning experiences and assure mastery of content by using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Planning Verbs (Staff, 2021) to write my ebook. I learned the importance of creating experiences that make my e-book accessible and meaningful for a specific grade level. I also learned that by knowing this, I make sure my future students can relate to something, and assure mastery of the content.
How This Artifact Demonstrates my Competence on the InTASC Standard:
I have demonstrated my competence in Standard #4 - Content Knowledge by creating an ebook that can relate to my future students. Throughout the process of writing my ebook, I was able to use content knowledge from living on a day-to-day basis with my dog to write an ebook that allowed me to create and visualize a learning experience for the students. I was able to assure mastery of the content by applying assignments like this with my future students in a classroom. As part of this experience, I was able to use Bloom’s Taxonomy (Shabatura, 2013) to write my ebook to be able to think ahead in the future how I can apply this content knowledge with my future learners and also use Bloom’s Taxonomy of Planning Verbs to help my future learners to write their own book. I feel that writing this ebook will allow me to bring meaningful content to my future learners by creating a book that was relatable to them or to their day-to-day lives with their own pet. I’m able to better implement meaningful learning experiences for my future students by writing about topics that children are relatable to by writing an ebook where each child is engaged, and the children are learning how to be self-disciplined and grow individually.