In our standards-driven, Middle school classrooms teachers are working hard connecting students to Next Generation Science Standards recently adopted by many schools across the state. A great example is Mr. Feldt’s 5th-grade classroom. The past few weeks, students have worked on gaining an understanding of one of the Next Gen Standards, 5-ESS1-2: Represent data in a graphical display to reveal patterns of daily changes in length and direction of shadows, day and night, and the seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky. Mr. Feldt is bringing this standard to life by creating engaging and active lessons that allow students to connect with new learning on how the Earth and Sun interact to create shadows. For an active portion of the unit, Mr. Feldt took students to the parking lot throughout the day to create shadow measurements. This allowed them to see that shadow lengths and positions change hour by hour. Bringing the learning back to the classroom students engage in cross-curricular content. In this case, he has students connecting skills from both Science and Math. Students had collected shadow length data. With this data, they learned how a graph can help to discover patterns, interpret trends, or understand their data in a meaningful way. The connections between science and other academic areas do not stop there! Students had opportunities to research, learn about units of measure, make predictions, and tie real-world problems to environmental or natural factors. Purposefully designed units like these allow students to find success in many more academic domains than just science. Students can leverage the skills learned in this unit as they enter their next math class, or need to research items for an upcoming literacy project.
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AuthorsJesup Connector Teachers Archives
December 2019
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