Planning
Narmada and I went through several different ideas of what we could do with combining children’s literature and psychology. After I made the suggestion of using The Dark by Lemony Snicket, we stumbled on the idea of teaching self-concept and self-efficacy using this book and The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. We met several times to work out the details and to create the videos that we wanted to show to the class.
Our main goal was to show the class how content from another field such as children’s literature can be used to teach difficult or hard to understand topics in another field such as psychology.
Integration of Technology
We created a PowerPoint with the basic information we were touching on from the two psychology concepts. We also included a number of discussion questions for each concept/book and for overall understanding and adaptation of our idea of cross-content learning. For each book, we created a video that fit the theme of the story: light and bubbly for The Rainbow Fish and dark and spooky for The Dark.
Lesson Delivery
We made sure through the use of our discussion questions that everyone was following our thought process and that everyone was able to see how the picture books could be used to teach the psychological concepts. We took turns presenting the information and we both interjected additional thoughts as they occurred to us or as the class brought up interesting points that we wanted to touch on further.
Individualization
We made sure to do a variety of different activities for different learners, from the PowerPoint to the videos and discussion questions. Although there was a lot of text on our slides, we did not read them word for word but rephrased the content aurally to the class to account for different learning styles.