With so many time constraints and curriculum requirements, particularly in the area of literacy, now placed on the classroom teacher, many find it challenging to teach adequate and meaningful science and social studies units. This unit was designed with that need of the classroom teacher in mind. Also in mind is the necessity to have students realize that nothing occurs in isolation, that all learning and living experiences happen in conjunction with many other factors.
The objectives for the unit are all aligned with the standards of New Haven Public Schools:
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- Students will state and define the four principles of flight.
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- Students will create and construct several different 'flying' mechanisms, observe and rate how the design affects how the mechanism flies.
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- Students will develop their communication by recording data and observations in science journals, charts, tables, and graphs.
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- Students will read the book
Dragonwings
by Laurence Yep, make predictions about what they will read and paraphrase what they have read.
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- Students will examine what life is like for an immigrant in America.
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- Students will compare and contrast their own culture and traditions to the Chinese traditions mentioned in the novel.
The main objective of the physics portion of this unit is to acquaint children with a somewhat simplistic version of flight. The culmination of the unit will be students building their own aircraft based on what they have learned about weight, lift, thrust, and drag. The students will conduct many experiments leading up to the construction of their own aircraft, beginning with kites (drawing from the character Windrider of Dragonwings who is a kite maker by trade), and moving to gliders. Students will experiment with the airfoil and how this wing design makes lift possible. As the students work with the airfoil, they will also conduct experiments designed to illustrate the principal of drag on an aircraft and how planes are designed to minimize this. Students will also examine the importance and sources of thrust in flight which, on an aircraft, comes from the jet engines located at the midpoint of the plane, and on a smaller planes comes from the propeller.
With this unit, there are many different ways in which to assess the students. To begin with, observation will be a very effective form of informal assessment. The teacher will observe the students' participation level with all whole-class activities, and also watch how each student interacts when working with a partner. It is important for the student to be able to communicate with her partner for her to complete the experiments. The students' science journals that they keep throughout the unit can also be used to assess their progress. In the journals the students will be keeping all of their observations and reflecting on those observations. This reflection should be a good indicator of the students' level of understanding of what they are doing and their thought processes. At the end of each experiment, the teacher will assess what the students have created, paying less attention to the correct completion of the project and more attention to whether or not the students understand why their design worked or did not work.