
This unit walks students through a variety of activities revolving around George Orwell's book '1984'.
- Subject:
- English Language Arts
- Material Type:
- Unit of Study
- Provider:
- Michigan Virtual
- Author:
- Abby Perdok
- Date Added:
- 06/28/2017
This unit walks students through a variety of activities revolving around George Orwell's book '1984'.
Design Thinking is a process for designing something to solve a problem. It shares a lot of similarities to the Engineering Design Process you might learn in a STEM class and the Scientific Method you learn in science. However, it tends to work really well with creating solutions to problems that impact humans, also known as Human Centered Design
In this Thing, you’ll work with a team to identify a problem, come up with ideas to solve it, make a prototype of your best idea, test it out and ultimately share it. Your goal is to make a positive impact on the problem you choose.
In this unit students will build upon their experiences with geometry in earlier grades. Seventh grade students use these skills to informally construct geometric figures.
Manipulatives, dynamic geometry, and tools like rulers and protractors will be particularly helpful with this unit. A particular focus in this unit is the construction of triangles when given combinations of measures of three angles and/or sides. Students will investigate which of these combinations create unique triangles, more than one triangle, or no triangle at all. Students will use the angle-angle criterion to determine similarity.
Angle relationships generated by intersecting lines including supplementary, complementary, adjacent, and vertical angles are also used in problem solving. Using these relationships, students will make conjectures and solve multistep problems with angles created by parallel lines cut by a transversal. They will also examine both angle sums of polygons and exterior angles.
Students will know and use formulas for the area and circumference of a circle and be able to determine the relationship between them.
In the previous unit children learned the procedures and routines needed to carry on with some independence as they begin building reading stamina. This unit continues with those routines and building stamina as students begin working on emergent storybook reading in a focused and concentrated way.In this unit children read emergent storybooks. Emergent storybook reading comes from Elizabeth Sulzby’s work on emergent literacy. The premise behind emergent storybook reading is that as students are exposed to the multiple readings of the emergent storybooks they begin to read these books on their own. Through these readings and familiarity of the emergent storybooks students’ begin to develop deeper understandings of the text, a strong sense of language and an increased desire to read independently.The first part of this units focuses on ways readers can read books using all they know to help themselves read. Early strategies like predicting and rereading are introduced. The way students read emergent story books develops over time; some children’s construction of the story will probably first involve looking at and commenting on each picture. Over time, all children learn to approximate and read the way the story sounds as if the child were reproducing the words and cadence of the text.The second part of this unit focuses on how readers study, think and grow ideas about books. They use their partners to talk about their thinking and share their understandings.The unit ends with readers trying different ways to read and share their books through retellings and acting out their favorite parts. This unit supports many of the Common Core State Standards, one of which states thatstudents need to engage in many different ways of reading independently and in partnerships with purpose and understanding.This unit should include the opportunity to introduce book bags and book shopping days. Students should have the chance to keep books until the next time they shop for new books. It is highly recommended that students shop for books (up to ten emergent story books) outside of reading workshop. This helps with management and time. Students may shop for ‘Look Books’ or the teacher can continue to use the tubs from unit 1 (adding new titles as needed). Since students will continue to have time allotted to read “Look Books” like the ones available in unit 1, the teacher should decide how to help students differentiate between emergent story books and Look Books.
The central idea of this unit is how sharing artifacts is a fundamental characteristic of humans that connects them to each other and culture.
In this unit, students develop in-depth understanding of volume and surface area. Students should understand volume as a measure of filling and surface area as a measure of wrapping an object. Students should have the opportunity to generate their own strategies for finding volume and surface area. Students will be able to use patterns and rules/formulas for finding surface area and volume of three-dimensional shapes.
This unit on American Indians: By studying the regions of the United States and the cultures that live in each region, students are able to compare/contrast within regions and across regions how tribes used their environments, and their cultural and other contributions to American life.
Note that the emphasis here is on broader groups of tribes for each region with some instruction on specific tribes representing each region. In no way is this case study approach to learning about one tribe meant to be generalized to all tribes of that region. We understand that each tribe was and continues to be unique in its culture, practices, lifeways, and traditions.
In this unit, students will be introduced to poetry. Students will learn about the different types of poetry characteristics through the use of poetry books, prezi presentations, music, and spoken word.
This is an Economics unit that I use in my 4th grade class. My district uses a text book called Social Studies Alive! I refer to this book in this lesson. I purchased an Econ. document from teacherspayteachers.com that you may purchase as well if you are interested.
This unit combines nonfiction reading, biographies, Henry Ford, and Michigan history into one unit. It covers many informational reading standards and Michigan social studies standards all together.
Students will be reading historical fiction book at their own level. They will read, summarize, and create three book projects that correlate with some of the 4th grade common core reading standards.
This unit engages students in a variety of different reading standards through face to face and online components. In this unit, students will practice many skills to aid them in reading and understanding nonfiction texts.
This unit is basically chapter 5 in our Math Expressions curriculum. If your district uses Math Expressions, then this unit will make a lot of sense to you. If you don't have Math Expressions, this unit can still help guide you through teaching your kids meausurement using customary and metric systems.
This unit is focused on figurative language, covering common core standards in language, literature for reading, and speaking and listening with the final assessment. It is designed to be used with a workshop model, where there is some form of opening for brief instruction, partner and/or independent work time, and a closing time for sharing within each lesson.
This unit includes a combination of fourth grade writing and social studies standards. It focuses on research and public discourse.
This unit features multiple types of reading strategies. The unit focuses on specific lessons to target reading strategies students use in the literacy class. For example, predicting before reading the book, making connections (self, text, to the world), visualizing the story, inferencing with background knowledge, summarizing the important details of the story, and asking questions to monitor comprehension.
Student facing 6th Grade math unit focusing on area and surface area.
This unit on thermal energy transfer begins with students testing whether a new plastic cup sold by a store keeps a drink colder for longer compared to the regular plastic cup that comes free with the drink. Students find that the drink in the regular cup warms up more than the drink in the special cup. This prompts students to identify features of the cups that are different, such as the lid, walls, and hole for the straw, that might explain why one drink warms up more than the other.
Students investigate the different cup features they conjecture are important to explaining the phenomenon, starting with the lid. They model how matter can enter or exit the cup via evaporation However, they find that in a completely closed system, the liquid inside the cup still changes temperature. This motivates the need to trace the transfer of energy into the drink as it warms up. Through a series of lab investigations and simulations, students find that there are two ways to transfer energy into the drink: (1) the absorption of light and (2) thermal energy from the warmer air around the drink. They are then challenged to design their own drink container that can perform as well as the store-bought container, following a set of design criteria and constraints.
This unit on weather, climate, and water cycling is broken into four separate lesson sets. In the first two lesson sets, students explain small-scale storms. In the third and fourth lesson sets, students explain mesoscale weather systems and climate-level patterns of precipitation. Each of these two parts of the unit is grounded in a different anchoring phenomenon.
The unit starts out with anchoring students in the exploration of a series of videos of hailstorms from different locations across the country at different times of the year. The videos show that pieces of ice of different sizes (some very large) are falling out of the sky, sometimes accompanied by rain and wind gusts, all on days when the temperature of the air outside remained above freezing for the entire day. These cases spark questions and ideas for investigations, such as investigating how ice can be falling from the sky on a warm day, how clouds form, why some clouds produce storms with large amounts of precipitation and others don’t, and how all that water gets into the air in the first place.
The second half of the unit is anchored in the exploration of a weather report of a winter storm that affected large portions of the midwestern United States. The maps, transcripts, and video that students analyze show them that the storm was forecasted to produce large amounts of snow and ice accumulation in large portions of the northeastern part of the country within the next day. This case sparks questions and ideas for investigations around trying to figure out what could be causing such a large-scale storm and why it would end up affecting a different part of the country a day later.
Students will learn the components of an informational essay. Through modeling, mini-lessons and multiple opportunities for practice and feedback, students will go through the writing process to produce an informational essay on the topic of their choice.
In this part of the unit on ratios and proportions, students will use ratio language to write ratios in a real-world context. They will be architects who are designing an amusement park, an aquarium research center, or a baseball stadium. Students will write equivalent ratios and use them to make their building a physically safe space that meets all building requirements. During this project, students will also be converting between units (e.g., inches and feet) as they find equivalent ratios. After students have made all of their calculations, they will analyze another set of design specifications and create a presentation explaining whether these new specifications would result in an architecturally safe building. Students will use their math calculations from the design challenge to justify their answers.
This unit addresses four 6th grade reading standards taught throughout the course of a trimester. These lessons are designed to be taught one day a week, while the other days in the trimester are focused on writing units. This unit is designed to be co-taught with a general education and special education teacher, but can be easily adapted if only one teacher is present.
In this part of the unit, students are exploring how global temperatures have changed over the past hundred years. Students will examine tables and graphs about global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, human consumption of food, and human consumption of natural resources. They will find patterns in the graphs. Based on this data, students will construct an argument about how human activities (increase in population and consumption of natural resources) cause global temperatures to increase.
Students will learn the components of a Narrative writing. Through mini-lessons (Ex: dialogue, story elements, figurative language, good introductions,genre study, etc.), daily writing and revising, students will go through the writing process to produce a narrative writing on a topic of their choice.
This unit on metabolic reactions in the human body starts out with students exploring a real case study of a middle-school girl named M’Kenna, who reported some alarming symptoms to her doctor. Her symptoms included an inability to concentrate, headaches, stomach issues when she eats, and a lack of energy for everyday activities and sports that she used to play regularly. She also reported noticeable weight loss over the past few months, in spite of consuming what appeared to be a healthy diet. Her case sparks questions and ideas for investigations around trying to figure out which pathways and processes in M’Kenna’s body might be functioning differently than a healthy system and why.
Students investigate data specific to M’Kenna’s case in the form of doctor’s notes, endoscopy images and reports, growth charts, and micrographs. They also draw from their results from laboratory experiments on the chemical changes involving the processing of food and from digital interactives to explore how food is transported, transformed, stored, and used across different body systems in all people. Through this work of figuring out what is causing M’Kenna’s symptoms, the class discovers what happens to the food we eat after it enters our bodies and how M’Kenna’s different symptoms are connected.
This unit on matter cycling and photosynthesis begins with students reflecting on what they ate for breakfast. Students are prompted to consider where their food comes from and consider which breakfast items might be from plants. Then students taste a common breakfast food, maple syrup, and see that according to the label, it is 100% from a tree.
Based on the preceding unit, students argue that they know what happens to the sugar in syrup when they consume it. It is absorbed into the circulatory system and transported to cells in their body to be used for fuel. Students explore what else is in food and discover that food from plants, like bananas, peanut butter, beans, avocado, and almonds, not only have sugars but proteins and fats as well. This discovery leads them to wonder how plants are getting these food molecules and where a plant’s food comes from.
Students figure out that they can trace all food back to plants, including processed and synthetic food. They obtain and communicate information to explain how matter gets from living things that have died back into the system through processes done by decomposers. Students finally explain that the pieces of their food are constantly recycled between living and nonliving parts of a system.
Does geography determine destiny? This Unit encompasses the prehistory eras 1 and 2 of the State of Michigan Standards. It includes essential vocabulary, resources to teach migration, Paleolithic life, and Neolithic time eras. This unit will also help to teach timelines and includes an online book resource along with a reading guide. Students will learn what has been discovered about prehistory and how historians know what we know. This unit includes geography its effects on the first peoples and the continuous effects of our environment on life today.
In this unit, students develop ideas related to how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance. Their investigations are motivated by trying to account for a perplexing anchoring phenomenon — a truck is playing loud music in a parking lot and the windows of a building across the parking lot visibly shake in response to the music.
They make observations of sound sources to revisit the K–5 idea that objects vibrate when they make sounds. They figure out that patterns of differences in those vibrations are tied to differences in characteristics of the sounds being made. They gather data on how objects vibrate when making different sounds to characterize how a vibrating object’s motion is tied to the loudness and pitch of the sounds they make. Students also conduct experiments to support the idea that sound needs matter to travel through, and they will use models and simulations to explain how sound travels through matter at the particle level.
This 8th grade unit highlights main events of the Civil Rights Movement and navigates to the life of Jackie Robinson and watching the movie 42.
A complete model for describing 1-D accelerated motion (descriptive, motion maps, graphs and kinematic equations). Begins with a paradigm lab of motion on an incline. The lab utilizes Vernier Logger Pro motion detectors the way I implement it, but can be done with other methods of data collection.
In this unit, students read the core texts The Hundred Dresses and Garvey’s Choice as a way of exploring what it means to be accepting and tolerant of themselves and others. The Hundred Dresses challenges students to think about the different roles associated with bullying through the eyes of the narrator, who struggles with her own involvement with a classmate who is bullied. Garvey’s Choice illustrates the way others influence the way we see ourselves, both positively and negatively, and the power of accepting ourselves by tracing Garvey’s path to self-discovery and acceptance. Both texts are full of moments and messages that are easily relatable for students at this grade level. Therefore, it is our hope that the experiences of the characters in both texts will serve as a neutral launching point for deeper discussions about bullying, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness.
In reading, the main focus of the unit is on identifying and tracing the central message across a longer text. Over the course of the text, students will develop a deep understanding of each character’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations, which will help them identify and explain how the central message is developed and conveyed through the characters. Students will also begin to understand how successive parts of a text build on each other to push the plot forward. Particularly with Garvey’s Choice, students will analyze the genre features of novels written in verse and how each part helps build and develop the central message. This unit also focused on point of view. Students will begin to notice the point of view in which a story is told and compare that with their own point of view.
The United States has a long history of activists seeking social, political, economic, and other changes to Americaalong with a history of other activists trying to prevent such changes. American activism covered a wide range of causes and utilized many different forms of activism. American sociopolitical activism became especially prominent during the period of societal upheaval which began during the 1950s. The African American civil rights movement led the way, soon followed by a substantial anti-war movement opposing American involvement in the Vietnam War, and later by vigorous activism involving womens issues, gay rights, and other causes. The United States remains a land of nearly constant change, and activists play a significant role in the ongoing evolution of American democracy. It seems likely that Americans will remain enthusiastic activists in the future. This exhibition is part of the Digital Library of Georgia.
This unit is to be used with second grade students to teach addition and subtraction strategies, or remediate with students needing extra practice.
In this unit, students will become familiar with fables and trickster tales from different cultural traditions and will see how stories change when transferred orally between generations and cultures. They will learn how both types of folktales employ various animals in different ways to portray human strengths and weaknesses and to pass down wisdom from one generation to the next. Use the following lessons to introduce students to world folklore and to explore how folktales convey the perspectives of different world cultures.
Students are expected to learn how to factor polynomials with an emphasis on quadratic expressions.
Understanding characteristics of quadratic functions and connections between various representations, tables, graphs and equations, are developed in this unit. The symmetry of the function values can be found in the table, the graph and the equation. The graphical form shows common characteristics of quadratic functions including maximum or minimum values, symmetric shapes (parabolas), location of the y-intercept, and the ability to determine roots of the function. Quadratic functions can be written in a variety of formats: polynomial form f (x) = ax2 + bx + c, factored form f (x) = a (x -p ) (x - q), and vertex form f (x) = a (x - h) 2 + k. This unit focusses on the vertex form. The impact of changing the parameters a, h, and k will be explored and understood.
Students have already had experience with patterns of numbers when studying linear, quadratic, and exponential functions in both Algebra 1 and Algebra 2. This is their first introduction to the formal notation used for sequences and summation notation for series. Students will explore series and summation notation. Arithmetic sequences and series, including finding common differences, terms, and partial sums will be examined in this unit. Students will also learn about geometric sequences and series, including finding common ratios, terms, partial sums, and infinite sums. Students will also explore how to write numbers with repeating decimals as fractions in simplest form using infinite geometric series and common ratio concepts.
In this unit, students will learn about plants/trees and will inquire about the ways all living things need plants. Students speak from the point of view of animal and will persuade someone not to cut down their tree.
In this unit, students will learn about plants/trees and will inquire about the ways all living things need plants. Students speak from the point of view of animal and will persuade someone not to cut down their tree.
In the spring of 1918, the United States was embroiled in World War I, fighting alongside the English, French, and Russians against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. In total, 70 million men were at war on multiple fronts across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. The tide was finally turning for the Allies after a crushing offensive by German forces mere weeks earlier. Then, a fierce enemy intervenedan outbreak of influenza that would decimate entire regiments and towns, kill civilians and soldiers alike by the millions, and rapidly become a global pandemic. This disease weakened forces on both sides, changing not only the course of the war but also the economies and population stability of every affected nation. In the long term, this particular outbreak would inspire research on an unprecedented scale and lead to advances in science and medicine, forever altering our understanding of epidemiology. From the spring of 1918 to early 1919, no aspect of life remained untouched by the pandemic for Americans at home and on the front. This exhibition explores the pandemics impact on American life. This exhibition was created as part of the DPLAs Digital Curation Program by the following students as part of Dr. Joan E. Beaudoin's course "Metadata in Theory and Practice" in the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University: Bethany Campbell, Michelle John, Samantha Reid-Goldberg, Anne Sexton, and John Weimer.