Katherine Aubrey Rationale for Content Knowledge Teachers should have objectives for their instruction.

In Virginia, teachers are required to teach the Standards of Learning. One of the language arts lessons that I taught during my first placement was on main idea and detail. The objective for the lesson was to instruct the students on how to summarize text using main idea and detail. The objective was derived from SOL 4.6.13 which stated that students would learn to organize important ideas and information after reading to support summarizing. They would also compose summaries of text, including main idea and supporting details. The lesson that was designed in order to fulfill the objective focused on main idea and detail. The lesson was introduced with a blank graphic organizer power point slide. The organizer was used to activate prior knowledge. The students were asked, Have you seen this before? Where have you seen this type of organizer, and What purpose does it serve? The students told me they have used the organizer in writing, homework, and to brainstorm ideas. After prior knowledge was activated, we moved into the rest of the power point which was meant to instruct the students on what is a main idea and what is a supporting detail. Then a passage was presented to the class and students were picked to tell me what the main idea and its supporting details. Their thoughts were highlighted on the passage and at the end I asked, Are you sure that this sentence is the main idea and these are the supporting details? The students began to think about that question and one of the students said that she disagreed with what was on the board. This disagreement launched a review and changes to the decision of the main idea and its supporting details. After the power point, the students were to pair up and they were given bags with a passage and sentence strips. The pairs received different passages, but no matter the passage the

objective of this activity was for the students to identify the main idea and details of the passage. After the students finished, their thoughts were reviewed in whole group and the other group had to confirm whether or not the current groups answers were correct. Then the other groups passage was reviewed and their answers were also reviewed. To finish the lesson the passages and strips were put back into baggies and every student received a new baggie with the same passage and sentence strips. They read and identified the main idea and details independently then as a class we went over the passage and answers. The students grasped the content very well, and the structure of the lesson gave the students responsibility for their learning.