I had a lot of fun planning this unit with Addie! We both like to read and thought it would be fun to do a multicultural unit including a book we read as students. The House on Mango Street is a unique book in the sense that it can be used in classrooms of many ages and can be analyzed very deeply or read for its surface value story. I would say our first success with this unit was going with an idea that we felt passionate about and were excited to teach!

It had been awhile since we had last looked at The House On Mango Street, so we re-read the book to bring our content knowledge up to par. At this point in the teaching program, I feel very comfortable planning lessons and knowing all the steps of a lesson I need to touch on when instructing students. However, I do think that I am still struggling with natural technology integration in my lesson plans. The more I observe and see it done, the easier it becomes. At the same time, when I am planning lessons I reflect a lot upon my own experiences as a student (because I was a student that loved school) and the ways in which I learned. However, technology was not included as much in instruction when I was in middle and high schyool and therefore, my reflections do not always bring the greatest lesson ideas to mind.

I would like to get to a point where I naturally incorporate technology and different technological devices into my lesson plans (depending on my future classroom resources). I find myself often planning lessons and then going back and incorporating technology in once I have the core structure of the lesson done. Sometimes its hard to go back into an already-made lesson and try to incorporate technology into it, and many times it causes you to cheapen the level of technology used and this is something I definitely want to avoid doing to my students. I think it would be great if I could become a teacher that always included technology into my core planning and instruction.