UNIT: Healthy Living

BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Students will xamine what contributes to a healthy lifestyle--food pyramid, exercise, stress level and create presentations in Spanish to explain these.

ESSENTIAL QUESTION: How are we alike?

UNIT QUESTIONS:
How do we communicate ideas in another language?
How does what we eat influence our health?
What amount of exercise is healthy?
How can exercise and diet affect our stress levels?

CONTENT QUESTIONS:
What are the current food pyramid guidelines for healthy eating?
What are some specific types of exercise that people can do easily?
How can we evaluate the level of stress in our daily life?

This module has made me think about my role as an instructional designer in the following ways: Project-based learning is something that is new and exciting to me, even if it is a little (or a lot) scary at the same time. I am going to have to re-think almost everything I do in planning units for my students in order for them to be more involved in their own learning. After having done some investigating and research about PBL I see that the old ways of just learning vocabulary or verb conjugation with no real-world meaning to students is not the way to go. If I can design lessons and projects that will involve my students in their own learning then I will really be "designing" instruction instead of just imparting information. This module has made me think about projects I have used in the past and to begin to evaluate what parts of the projects are useful and how I can refine and add to them, and to the assessment of the projects, so that the students are in charge of their learning and see a real-world purpose in doing them. Something our instructor, Mike, said during the first class has stuck with me and really made me think about my role, and that is that the test should be the culmination of the journey and if the teacher and students don't know where they are in the journey then the test is meaningless. That's paraphrasing and might not be exactly what he said, but it is what has made me think about teaching and learning. I like the term "instructional designer" --I just hope I'm up to becoming one!