Running head: CONTENT KNOWLEDGE

Content Knowledge
Audrie Lofay
Regent University

In partial fulfillment of UED 495 Field Experience ePortfolio, Spring 2015

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE

In order to write lessons, the first thing the teacher must consult are content standards.
These content standards determine what the student must learn or be able to do. They can be
used to decide what we want our students to take away from the lesson. In Virginia, teachers use
the SOLs as the standard for which they base their instruction off of. These SOLs, or Standards
of Learning, have been created to set a standard for what students are expected to achieve during
the learning process. I have used these standards as a guide for creating my lessons. The artifacts
that I have chosen are pictures from a SMART Board lesson on maps and a project created from
this lesson.
Rationale for Selection of Artifacts
The first three artifacts that I am including for this competency are pictures of the
students interacting with a SMART Board lesson on maps. This lesson is based off of the
following kindergarten standards: K.3, The student will describe the relative location of people,
places, and things by using positional words, with emphasis on near/far, above/below, left/right,
and behind/in front, K.4c, The student will use simple maps and globes to locate land and
water features, and K.5a-c, The student will develop an awareness that maps and globes a
show a view from above; show things in smaller size; show the position of objects (History and
Social Science, 2008). These standards provided a guide for the design process as it represents
the knowledge that students should master to be considered proficient (Wiggins & McTighe,
2005, p. 351). The lesson presented information on symbols and other major features found on a
map. We discussed the purposes of a map key as well as a compass rose, and the students were
able to practice their ordinal directions.
The last artifact is a map that one of the students created based off their understanding of
maps from the weeks instruction. They were made from big construction paper, crayons, and
markers. The students had to first think of four of the most important parts of the setting,
including land and water features, from any fairy tale we read that week. The students then

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE

created a map key with those four places using symbols that shows things in smaller sizes. After
they created their map key with labeled symbols, they then created their compass rose to show
their understanding of positional words and cardinal directions. Once these were complete, the
students then created their map, making sure that all of their symbols were present on their map.
This project was based from essential understandings that are derived from the content standards
used during the maps lesson.
Reflection on Theory and Practice
As a culminating project for my Curriculum Design course, we created a unit plan based
on the backward design process. These project required us to determine what standard we
wanted to base our plan off of, which in turn guided the unit. We used the nouns and adjectives
to guide our essential understandings and the verbs to guide our performance tasks. Though this
lesson was not necessarily created using backward design, it was definitely evident that the
standards were present in the lesson, both in content and performance.
Overall, the lesson went well. The kids love fairy tales, and I am learning that I am loving
this unit as well. It makes it easy to come up with ideas for extending the stories and letting the
students be creative. I am noticing with the more experience I am having in the classroom,
paying particular attention to creating and implementing the lessons, I can now see how
backward design comes into play. I understand better now the theories I studied and why they are
they are so important to the lesson making process. Whereas before I knew the process, it didnt
make as much sense as when I actually saw it being implemented and how successful it was to
the students learning and understanding.

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE

References
History and social science standards of learning for Virginia Public Schools. (2008, January).
Retrieved from
http://doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/history_socialscience/next_version/stds
_historyk.pdf
Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. (2nd Ed.) Alexandria, VA:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.