Finding Your Anchor

Anchoring Activity: An ongoing assignment that students work on independently and is meaningfully connected to the lesson.

Identify an anchoring lesson/activity/program about 30-90 minutes in length that you want to use as an anchoring activity throughout the whole course. You should be very familiar with this anchoring activity already.  It might be a lesson you’ve personally designed, a program you frequently lead in your workplace (creek exploration, a habitat hike, or a wildlife program), an activity from a published curriculum (ex: Project Learning Tree or Project Wild lesson you regularly use), or something else entirely. Ideally, you should have a written copy of the plan for this anchoring activity to reference throughout the course. 

You’ll be reviewing this anchoring activity repeatedly from multiple perspectives throughout the course. If you’ve chosen a longer activity, you might consider focusing on individual components of the lesson during these reviews. At the end, you’ll redesign the activity applying the principles of UDL.  

If for any reason you do not have your own activity or lesson to use, you can use this sample Classroom Garden lesson (or click here to open in this window). 

  • Click File > Make a Copy, or download as a Word document, to edit as your own. 
  • Be sure to mentally walk through this lesson to consider how you might teach it if you were asked to do so today.