This

social studies unit-opening lesson plan on family was chosen to address Professional Teaching Standard 2 - Human Development and Learningstating, The competent teacher understands how individuals grow, develop, and learn and provides learning opportunities that support the intellectual, social, and personal development of all students. This artifact was chosen because it demonstrates how I, as a practicum student teacher, have brought socially beneficial lessons into my placement classroom. While it is important for students to understand academic material, it is equally, if not more important, for them to have school experiences that help them better understand society as a whole and themselves as individuals. This artifact is an appropriate representation of the standard because family is an important aspect of social development, especially at a kindergarten level. The Family Book by Todd Parr is a means of demonstrating the concept of family as a whole in modern American society, and students were exposed to new ways of thinking about what a family is. The book expresses newer concepts of both traditional and non-traditional family units, such as families separated by distance, families with same-sex parents, and families with stepparents and stepchildren. The family portrait individual project aspect of the lesson was a powerful way for students to connect with the family concepts just learned through the Todd Parr read-aloud. Students put much effort into the family portrait when this lesson was executed, and it was apparent that students wanted to truly understand what family meant to them personally. This artifact demonstrates my growth as an educator because there were many components that had to be thoroughly thought out before giving this lesson to my students. Family discussion can be controversialthe idea of the new modern family may not be accepted by all students or parents. I had to be very careful when selecting which piece of literature to share in read-aloud when introducing this new family unit to my kindergarten students. I also had to carefully consider how I wanted students to create their family portraits. I wanted my students to have creative rights in expressing how they perceive their family, but I also wanted to make sure that the assignment was guided and that no students would feel left out if family is a touchy issue. In deciding to create my own blackline masters of the characters from the Todd Parr book, I think that I gave students enough options to select the characters they thought suited their family members best, yet the characters were very open-ended in the sense that they were racially unidentifiable, of different ages and body builds, and of different genders with differing physical characteristics. I think that a lesson on family can be very disheartening to students if home life is not good, but all of my students seemed very happy and very confident in the portraits that they had created. I was very proud of the way that I planned and implemented the lesson with the class. I would not change a thing if I were to do it again, and that has a lot to do with how much time and thought I put into the lesson beforehand.