Meet savvy scientist and inventor Hedy Lamarr, also known for her career as a glamorous international movie star. Dubbed "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World," Hedy actually preferred spending time creating inventions in her workshop to strutting down the red carpet. Hedy co-invented the technology known as frequency hopping, which turned out to be one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century! Today's cell phone, computers, and other electronic devices would be more vulnerable to hacking without the groundbreaking system discovered by a world-famous actress and gifted inventor. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Create small groups. Pass out one of the challenges listed in the lesson plan/book card to each group for them to come up with an invention that will solve the problem at hand.

Frances Gabe detested housework, so she invented a contraption to free herself from this tedious task forever: a self-cleaning house! Gabe's wacky, wonderful home included almost 70 new patented inventions, from a soap-spraying sprinkler in the ceiling to a kitchen cabinet that washed, dried, and stored dishes all in one place. Though Gabe's invention didn't catch on, her determination and clever thinking remind us that we don't have to accept the world as it is; we can improve it using our minds and our own two hands. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Frances Gabe created over 70 inventions because she hated cleaning. What is one thing you hate doing for chores? Develop an invention to have it clean itself.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Amy Guglielmo, Jacqueline Tourville, and Giselle Potter tell the story of autism advocate Dr. Temple Grandin’s childhood and her quest to experience the sensation of a hug. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Students will work to develop an assistive technology solution for people with autism. Alternatively, students may develop assistive technology solutions for students with differing abilities. Students are encouraged to work with peers in a local special education classroom to combine their love of technology and engineering to help positively influence their peers’ lives.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

This guidance document helps teachers understand the why, as well as the concrete what and how, of the ALL Block: the five components, how each component reinforces the work from the module lessons, how rotations work, what a day in the ALL Block looks like, and Frequently Asked Questions.

This unit is designed to develop foundational skills needed to prepare students for learning and making meaning of a variety of text types. The unit will provide students with opportunities to listen to and explore a variety of everyday print materials such as storybooks, poems, and informational texts to engage in interactive discussions of the messages and meaning of texts. This unit teaches students that they are readers and have a vital role in their classroom community.

Students will continue practicing routines necessary for learning:
• Working productively in the meeting area
• Working with a partner to Think-Pair- Share
• Book handling and learning about the parts of texts
• Selecting texts for independent reading
• Using everything in the classroom for reading support

This is the formal introduction to EL Education Language Arts Curriculum. It explains the structure of our program and lays out the principles behind our design. It includes our approach to addressing the Common Core ELA and literacy standards, and specifics about the key features of our comprehensive literacy curriculum (3 hours/day for K-2, 2 hours/day for Grades 3-5), as well as a description of the 3-5 Life Science Modules.

The K-5 Recommended Texts & Other Resources list contains books and other resources that have been selected by our experts to support research or read-alouds for each module.

In this blended unit students will review the parts of a story including characters, setting, beginning, middle, and end. Students will analyze a character based on their words, actions and thoughts. Students will describe complex characters, and identify character motivation giving supporting details from the text. They will explain how a character changes over the course of a narrative. Students will describe a setting and the events of a story using details from the text. Students will make inferences related to the details given in the story.

Meg set out to climb up and investigate the rain forest tree canopies — and to be the first scientist to do so. But she encountered challenge after challenge. Male teachers would not let her into their classrooms, the high canopy was difficult to get to, and worst of all, people were logging and clearing the forests. Meg never gave up or gave in. She studied, invented, and persevered, not only creating a future for herself as a scientist, but making sure that the rainforests had a future as well. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Your community has many different areas to explore - it might be a park, a grocery store, a forest, or an alley. For some people, it might be difficult to explore these areas because they may have differing abilities. Select one area in your community, and come up with a plan to build a way for it to be more accessible to everyone.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Richard grew up in Kenya as a Maasai boy, herding his family’s cattle, which represented their wealth and livelihood. Richard’s challenge was to protect their cattle from the lions who prowled the night just outside the barrier of acacia branches that surrounded the farm’s boma, or stockade. Though not well-educated, 12-year-old Richard loved tinkering with electronics. Using salvaged components, spending $10, he surrounded the boma with blinking lights, and the system works; it keeps lions away. His invention, Lion Lights, is now used in Africa, Asia, and South America to protect farm animals from predators. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Your challenge is to use broken or old technology and other available resources to create a prototype that can be used to protect your home. This could involve tinkering, hacking, or redesigning the components of the technology to meet your needs.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

The true story of how Momofuko Ando was inspired to create one of the world’s most popular foods after seeing long lines of hungry people waiting for a simple bowl of ramen following World War II. He dreamed about making a new kind of ramen noodle soup that was quick, convenient, and tasty for the hungry people because he believed that peace follows from a hungry stomach. With persistence, creativity, and a little inspiration, Ando succeeded. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Develop a food product (a new food, tool, or invention, et al) to help increase access to food in your community.

Tells the story of how the Slinky, the most popular toy in American history, was invented. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Develop a commercial about the Slinky.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

A young girl has a wonderful idea to make the most MAGNIFICENT thing! But making her magnificent thing is anything but easy, and the girl repeatedly tries and fails. Eventually, she quits, but a walk with her dog and time to think, she comes back to her project with renewed enthusiasm and manages to get it just right. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Create small groups. Pass out one of the challenges listed in the lesson plan/book card to each group for them to come up with an invention that will solve the problem at hand.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Isatou Ceesay observed a growing problem in her community where people increasingly disposed of unwanted plastic bags, which accumulated into ugly heaps of trash. She found a way to be the agent of change by recycling the bags and transforming her community. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Use plastic bags to develop a new product (i.e. jump rope).

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

With encouragement and ideas from his family, Papa, based on the real-life inventor Lodner Phillips, builds a working submarine that takes his family on a ride to the bottom of Lake Michigan. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Students will use materials on hand to design a solution to a problem they see in their school or at home. The invention should meet the needs of fellow students, teachers, bus drivers, principals, siblings, friends, or even parents.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Currently, poetry is something we teach "if there is time" at the end of the year. I would love to make poetry a more integral part of the 1st grade curriculum. Poetry is currently taught by the students reading a preprinted packet of poetry and the students knowing that they are poems.  It's a very archaic way of teaching it, and I would love to change that.

The students are introduced to poetry throughout our curriculum (Scott Foresman Reading Street) through songs and curriculum poems, but are never specifically taught what makes a poem. This blended unit will change that! This unit will fall at the end of the 1st grade school year.

Created By: Katharine Valz

In this unit, students explore the power of reading and writing around the world. Over the course of the unit, students will grapple with and explore the power involved with education and reading, and why so many people across the world seek the power to read. Students will also discover that not all people have equal access to education and that in many places receiving a high-quality education is not an easy feat. As a connection to the informational unit on continents, when the setting is clearly defined by the author either in the author’s note or directly in the text, make sure to reference it and challenge students to notice features of the culture or country. It is important to note that many of the texts in this unit are fiction; therefore, large generalizations about an entire culture or country should not be made based on the books alone. Students should, however, be challenged to think about the ways in which the author portrays the characters’ struggles and desire for education and what we can learn from the characters’ experiences. It is our hope that this unit, in connection with other units in the sequence, will begin to open students’ eyes to the world around us and the ways in which values are similar and different around the world.

In reading, it is assumed that students are inquisitive consumers of the text and are able to retell stories, including key details, using both the illustrations and words as a guide. Therefore, in this unit students will be pushed further to notice more nuanced central messages, particularly related to the idea of education and reading. Students will also be pushed to notice the words and phrases an author includes to suggest feeling and appeal to the senses. In Unit 3, students were exposed to the skill of compare and contrast by comparing and contrasting similar versions of the same story. In this unit, students will be pushed to the next level by comparing and contrasting more nuanced experiences and messages across multiple stories.

In writing, students will continue to write daily in response to the text. In every piece of writing, students should be expected to correctly answer the question and provide details from the text to support their answer. In this unit, students will begin to learn how to explain their evidence and thinking in a way that shows a deeper understanding of the question or text. By the end of the unit, most students should be able to score a 3 on the Reading Response rubric.

This activity uses the book "The Patchwork Quilt", by Valerie Flournoy to give students the sense of family in the classroom community.

This video is part of the Learn and Grow with WHRO TV series. Watch Kelsey Eanes teach about the short /e/ word families through poetry, pictures, and writing.