In this unit, students build a deeper understanding, appreciation, and respect for the wide variety of religions found in the world by reading two core texts: What Is Religion? and One World, Many Religions: The Ways We Worship. In today’s society, illiteracy regarding religion is widespread and fuels prejudice and bullying. The negative impacts of religious illiteracy and intolerance can be minimized by teaching religion in a non-devotional, academic perspective. Therefore, this unit challenges students to build a broader awareness and understanding of religion by exposing students to a diversity of religious views and educating students about some of the most common religions. It is important to note that this unit is not intended to promote the acceptance of one particular religion or serve as a place to practice religion. Instead, it is our goal that this unit will help students better understand the differences and similarities among the religions and cultures of their classmates, and begin to appreciate and respect differences in religion.

As readers, this unit challenges students to synthesize information across two texts to build a deeper understanding of a topic. Students will analyze how authors support points, what structures they include to emphasize key ideas, and how different texts provide different perspectives and information about similar topics.

In this unit, students explore the relationship between living things and their environment and how the environment can both positively and negatively impact a species’ ability to survive. Using the Next Generation Science Standards as a guide, students will learn about different species, what they need for survival, their life cycle, and how they have adapted for survival. Then students will be challenged to create arguments that explain why some organisms are able to survive well, some survive less well, and others can’t survive at all in certain habitats. Through this unit, along with others in the sequence, students will use the scientific information they learn to think critically about the world around them.

The Science of Living Things texts were chosen as mentor texts for this unit because the author, Bobbie Kalman, uses text features and clear language to clearly communicate complex concepts about the animal kingdom, life cycles, and animal adaptations. As readers, students will be challenged to constantly ask and answer questions about key details in the text, explicitly referring to the text to support an answer or a question. Over the course of the unit, students will also deepen their understanding of how Bobbie Kalman uses text features to not only organize information, but to help a reader learn new information and facts about a subject. Students will also work on using context clues to figure out the meaning of genre-specific vocabulary, find the main idea of a section, and explain cause and effect in relation to scientific concepts.

Area: Structure & Info Processing

This First Grade unit is the SECOND in the curriculum of three (3) units developed to address the First Grade science standards of the Michigan Science Standards related to Structure and Information Processing.

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Students will observe how plants and animals have offspring and some may look similar but not exactly like their parents/adults.  Students will explore how plants and animals have features (external and internal) that allow them to survive, grow, and meet their needs.   Students will make many observations about plant and animal parts and how they use their parts to help them survive. They will observe how different plants and animals support their offspring in survival.  Students will classify similar animals that  can vary in many ways.  Students will then apply their understanding of plant and animal survival in order to gain ideas about how to engineer something to solve a human problem.  Students will use their knowledge of plant and animal parts  to mimic one of these parts to design a solution to a human problem.  Students will construct explanations and models for multiple engineering tasks.

Determine the technical meaning of words using context clues and reference texts to develop an understanding of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Area: Matter, Energy, Ecosystems

This Fifth Grade unit is the FOURTH in the curriculum of four (4) units developed to address the Fifth Grade science standards of the Michigan Science Standards related to Matter, Energy, Ecosystems.

You have just read the general description for this Phenomenal Science Unit. Before you continue your review, it would be very valuable to our field testing process for the 21 Units of Phenomenal Science for us to gather information about those educators who are reviewing each of the Units. Thank you. Please start your review with this BRIEF SURVEY(link is external). Enjoy your review.

Should water from the Great Lakes be used in other places? The question of “who owns the water?” and “should it be used to help other places in the country that need it?” is one that our nation has been wrestling with for years. You will be responsible for writing an opinion essay on this very topic. You will be introduced to the topic of decreasing water levels in the Great Lakes by watching two videos and reading a short passage. Finally you will compose an opinion essay on the public issue: Should water be diverted from the Great Lakes to other parts of the United States that need water?

Explore urban areas around the world, including their layout, size, and other factors.

GeoInquiries are designed to be fast and easy-to-use instructional resources that incorporate advanced web mapping technology. Each 15-minute activity in a collection is intended to be presented by the instructor from a single computer/projector classroom arrangement. No installation, fees, or logins are necessary to use these materials and software.

This lesson is a follow-up to learning the CRAAP strategy (or some other evaluation strategy) and allows students to put it into practice.  This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?"

In this lesson, students will examine a preselected set of newspaper articles drawn from the "Chronicling America" website. They will determine the right each article illustrates and the responsibility that comes with that right.

Epic has over 25,000 books, videos and quizzes for students. Elementary teachers are able to sign up for a free account and use the Epic library with their students. Students will learn how to navigate a digital library and use appropriate tools to aid in their reading. In this activity, students will be introduced to fables and will use Microsoft Paint or Google Drawings to illustrate the moral of the story.

For the students to independently access Seesaw App, use a variety of tools to upload their speech articulation activity to share with parents.

Social media is designed to allow users to freely post claims and evidence. Though this can make social media a powerful source of information, it also means that we must learn to verify sources, arguments, and evidence that are presented before we decide they are trustworthy. Different posts may require different approaches to verification, and the more flexible we are in deploying these strategies the less likely we are to be deceived by a misleading post.

This lesson will help students develop and practice methods for verifying sources, arguments, and evidence presented on social media.

 Verifying social media posts is quickly becoming a necessary endeavor in everyday life, let alone in the world of education. Social media has moved beyond a digital world which connects with friends and family and has become a quick and easy way to access news, information, and human interest stories from around the world. As this state of media has become the "new normal," especially for our younger generations, we, educators, find ourselves charged with a new task of teaching our students how to interact with and safely consume digital information.The following three modules are designed to be used as stand-alone activities or combined as one unit, in which the lessons can be taught in any order. "Who Said What?!" is a module focusing on author verification. "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words'' is a module devoted to image verification. "Getting the Facts Straight" is a module designed to dive into information verification. Lastly, there are assessment suggestions to be utilized after completing all three modules.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: Materials The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle The students work individually or in pairs. Each student or pair needs: Three ten-frames for each s...

The purpose of this course is to provide a project-based visual arts program, which guides students to achieve the standards in the visual arts and career technical training, by providing students with the technical instruction and practical experiences for aspiring video and film makers in the production of film, video, and new media projects for business and entertainment. Students experience both the creative and technical aspects of filmmaking in conjunction with learning about historical and contemporary traditions and conventions.Students are instructed on the three stages of project creation. In pre-production, students learn the basic principles of story development, screenplay writing, storyboarding, scheduling and budget planning. Instruction in the production stage includes basic visual composition, color theory, set up and operation of camera, sound, and lighting equipment. Students learn to use cutting-edge software applications for video and audio post-production. Mastering and delivery methods, in both traditional and new media, are explored.The course also includes the basics of job shadowing, internships, and job placement. The competencies in this course are aligned with the California High School Academic Content Standards and the California Career Technical Education Model Curriculum Standards. Interdisciplinary experiences and arts activities lead to refining a personal aesthetic, and a heightened understanding of career opportunities in art and arts-related fields.

This lesson helps students "hear" some of the diverse colonial voices that, in the course of time and under the pressure of novel ideas and events, contributed to the American Revolution. Students analyze a variety of primary documents illustrating the diversity of religious, political, social, and economic motives behind competing perspectives on questions of independence and rebellion.

Clues to Walt Whitman's effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse may be found in his Notebooks, now available online from the American Memory Collection.  In an entry to be examined in this lesson, Whitman indicated that he wanted his poetry to explore important ideas of a universal scope (as in the European tradition), but in authentic American situations and settings using specific details with direct appeal to the senses.

In the early days of 1776, most Americans were naďve when assessing just how difficult the war would be. Great initial enthusiasm led many men to join local militias where they often served under officers of their own choosing. Yet, these volunteer forces were not strong enough to defeat the British Army, which was the most highly trained and best equipped in the world. Furthermore, because most men preferred serving in the militia, the Continental Congress had trouble getting volunteers for General George Washington's Continental Army. This was in part because, the Continental Army demanded longer terms and harsher discipline.