Hi everyone and welcome back to my third blog post! 

For this Project, my partner and I have decided to create a Mini Unit to go along with the book The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss. Following reading the book to their class, teachers can follow our mini unit to work on word families. We want this mini unit to include a word family worksheet as well as a coloring aspect to keep the student’s imaginations alive while learning valuable information. Our intended age range for this Mini Unit is Kindergarten. An important aspect of this unit is reading and writing with the ability to recognize patterns. These aspects will cater to students who are visual- spatial, linguistic-verbal and musical learners. Students will hear a fun story, while learning an educational lesson on word families and even color to bring it all to life. 

Our goal for this project is to create a mini unit that is the perfect tool for a Kindergarten teacher. The objective is to have students gain appreciation for the word play and rhyming featured in the work of Dr Seuss. Also, we want students to be able to identify rhyming patterns and word families as well as learn to produce them. It will help visual learners engage in visual arts, Musical learners work with patterns and will allow Linguistic learners to verbally communicate and build word families out loud. This tool we created will help teachers keep their students involved and interested, but still allow them learn. 

So far we have worked very hard to create a mini unit that is of value for kindergarten teachers to be able to use as an example if they would like to teach their class using Cat in the Hat. At this point in the project we have decided we will have a word family worksheet to go along with the book as well as a class coloring activity. Going forward, it is now important we create a timeline for teachers to follow and decide on the exact worksheet that will be used. 

We have created this Mini Unit to go along with Cat in the Hat for a few reasons. Dr Seuss creates very colorful and exciting stories that children love. It was important to us that we chose a book that children would be excited to read. A big part of kindergarten is learning new words and how to spell. Dr Seuss helps bring this to life in a way that keeps students enthusiastic about learning. We have created this so teachers can have a fun and colorful way to teach their students about word families.

Annotated Bibliography:

Geshuri, Yossef. “Observational Learning: Effects of Observed Reward and Response Patterns.” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 63, no. 4, Aug. 1972, pp. 374–80. 1973-06499-001, EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/h0033545.

This source is a scholarly source because it is written by a Professional and is also peer reviewed. It is also a journal of Educational psychology written at the institute of Child behavior and development. The journal provides an in depth understanding of children’s responses to praised behavior. This is helpful to our project because it is important to give positive reinforcement and praise Kindergarten children. Providing them with appraisal will motivate them to continue the behavior. 

Dere, Zeynep. “Analyzing the Early Literacy Skills and Visual Motor Integration Levels of Kindergarten Students.” Journal of Education and Learning, vol. 8, no. 2, 2019, pp. 176–81.

This source is a scholarly source because it is a peer reviewed Journal of Education and Learning. It features a vast variety of knowledge on children’s school readiness and they development of knowledge in reading and writing. This source is helpful to our project because it gives an analysis of the early literacy skills of children which will play a huge part in our mini unit. 

Gopnik, Alison. “Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications.” Science, vol. 337, no. 6102, 2012, pp. 1623–27. JSTOR.

This source is a scholarly source because it is a peer reviewed written by a professional individual at the developmental collection. This article provides an overview into the learning and thought processes of young children. It features an in depth description on how they form and test hypotheses and how they learn and observe patterns. This is helpful to our project because it gives us an understanding of how children will react to finding and observing patterns  in word families throughout the book.