In this unit, 2nd graders explore the genre of mystery—in conjunction with exploring the American pastime of baseball—by reading the mentor text The Fenway Foul-Up. Over the course of the unit, students will be challenged to think about and notice the characteristics of a mystery and how an author uses the characteristics of mystery to develop the plot. Students will also be challenged to think about what makes a good detective and how much information detectives need before they can be confident enough in their decisions to avoid unfairly or unjustly accusing someone of committing a crime. Students will also discover that being a good detective involves teamwork; teamwork makes everything easier because people are able to play off of each other’s strengths and differing perspectives. While the main focus of this unit is on understanding the mystery genre, students will also be learning a great deal about baseball and content-specific vocabulary associated with baseball.

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 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 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.