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.