Julianne K. Kaphar
While this thematic unit of instruction will primarily focus on science, I plan to also integrate language arts, math, and social studies wherever possible (see standards in Appendix 1). The unit will be taught in the last quarter of the year, when students have acquired a basic knowledge of English and are able to begin sheltered content instruction with primary language support. It will last 3-4 weeks.
I will open the unit with a strategy called a "gallery walk." In this activity, several photographs pertaining to the topic (garbage dumps, pristine forests, beaches, city streets) and a variety of objects (Dunkin' Donuts coffee cups, candy wrappers, and other commonly found litter) will be posted at different stations throughout the room. Students will rotate around the room, study the photographs/objects, and write their observations and questions on a paper next to the photograph that has a specific prompt, such as "I observe," "I wonder," or "I predict." These objects and cards can be left up for the duration of the unit. At the end of the unit, students can go back and do the activity again, this time writing what they have learned about each object/picture.
Next, I will do an "inquiry chart." In this activity, which is detailed below, students' prior knowledge, which has been activated during the gallery walk, is recorded on a chart with student initials by each statement. Student questions are also generated which can be added to throughout the unit and researched by the students to create greater enthusiasm for learning.
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Sometime during the first week of the unit, I will set up an experiment involving two compost piles in the schoolyard using mesh baskets, potting soil and worms. For five days, students will collect their waste and place it in one of the two piles- one for organic waste (things such as food and paper) and one for inorganic waste (cans, plastic, etc.). They will record their predictions of what they will see in one month in their science notebooks. Students will regularly observe (once a week) the process of decomposition (or lack thereof) through recording with drawings and notes in their notebooks.
Next, I will introduce a Big Book, which is also detailed below, called "The Important Book about Trash." Each page in this book follows the same pattern. The repeated line is "The important thing about trash is that we need to reduce, reuse, and recycle to protect the environment." Each page will begin and end with this line, and in the middle, it will talk about different aspects of trash (where it goes, what's in a landfill, problems with landfills, effects on the environment, etc.). This book will incorporate key vocabulary for the unit.
Students will also, at this point, become exposed to some chants and poems which will reinforce the target vocabulary (see lesson plan 3). In these poems, the parts of speech will be color-coded. The poems follow a specific frame, and are highly contextualized with pictures and photographs to support struggling readers and ELLs. Three such poems are "Trash here, trash there," "Unusual Conservationist" and "Water Cycle Boogie." Once students have mastered the poems toward the end of the unit, they will do a Sentence Patterning Chart in which they practice building sentences in English using newly learned vocabulary (lesson 4).
The next lesson will be a time line of trash history. First, I will place a thin line of paper across one wall of the classroom. Then, I will place the date 2005 at one end to show students where we are on the time line. From there, I will proceed to place dates associated with certain time periods in history, labeling the eras. Below each date and label, I will place a picture of what "trash" looked like for that people group, along with some key words. In this way, students will become familiar with World History terms such as "Prehistoric," "nomadic," "Ancient civilizations," "Greeks," "Romans," "Middle Ages," and "Industrial Revolution." Students will then be given their own time lines to fill out and label with the same information.
Following these activities, I plan to introduce students to the concept of cycles in nature. I hope that as students begin to understand that nature functions in cycles, they will have a better foundation for understanding why
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cyling is important for emulating nature. I will use two models to demonstrate the water cycle. First, I will design a mini-ecosystem in a terrarium to demonstrate the water cycle. In the center of the terrarium, I will place a cup of water with measurements marked on the outside. Inside this cup, I will place two smaller communion cups: one upside down to hold up another one on top, which will be used to catch the water that eventually falls as precipitation. Around the cup of water, which will act as a lake, I will put various plants. The entire terrarium will be covered in plastic, and a weight will be place in the middle of the plastic. The terrarium will be placed in a sunny spot, and students will observe the terrarium over a day or two. From this demonstration, students will come to understand the processes of evaporation, transpiration, condensation, and precipitation.
The next demonstration will clearly show how water moves throughout the earth, carrying pollutants and toxins to bodies of water. For this demonstration, each group of students will receive their own tub of wet diatomaceous earth, tilted up at one end, thus forming a "lake" or "ocean" at the bottom. A cup of blue tinted water with 2 notches around the rim will be placed at the top of the tub- this will be the "source" of the river. A bent straw will be placed in the notch, and the teacher will suck some water to begin the flow of the river (it should continue dripping once started). Once the river has formed and is flowing to the sea, students can place monopoly houses at various points around the river. Then, the teacher will pass out pre-dyed Q-Tips of different colors, which the students will stick in the earth to represent landfills, pollution from factories, or other forms of pollution. The teacher then comes around with a spray bottle to create a "rainstorm." Students should be able to observe the pollutants dying all the water different colors from the storm. This will help students understand the significance of landfills in polluting groundwater sources as well as nearby bodies of water (Adopted from the URI/ Open Spaces as Learning Places project.)
Following this, I will use a direct instruction strategy called a "pictorial input" to explain the water cycle. In this strategy, I will first pencil in the diagram and labels on a piece of large chart paper so that students cannot see it. Then, as I explain the water cycle, I will draw it and label it at the same time. Students can then copy the diagram and labels into their learning logs. This is one way of "contextualizing" the learning so that language learners can better understand and follow along.
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Once students begin to grasp the concept that nature functions in cycles, I will use a strategy called a "narrative input," in which I place pictures/photos on a backdrop large enough for all students to see as I relate a story about a piece of plastic trash. In the story, the piece of trash will follow other pieces of trash which decompose, get recycled, or remain untouched in the garbage dump. The story will introduce students to the world of "life after the garbage can." The students will hear the story several times over a few days, and after practicing retelling, story mapping, and summarizing, they will list the cycles that they saw occurring in the story (carbon cycle, recycled materials). We will discuss why certain things in the garbage cannot be recycled.
We will then make our final observations of our compost piles and connect our observations with the narrative input. Students will explain in writing why they think the items in one compost pile decomposed faster than the other. This will provide important background knowledge for our trip to the garbage dump.
Following this, students will begin to use observation skills to see how human activity has altered nature's cycles. We will take a field trip to a meadow where students will record their observations of living things and the environment. Then we will go to the local garbage dump, where they will observe how the natural environment has been disrupted. They will record their observations in their science notebooks using their five senses. I would like to also take students to the local recycling plant for a tour.
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By this time, it is my hope that students will have a heightened awareness of the effects of our waste on the environment. Now, they will begin to focus on graphing using data that they collect on their own. Because my students typically have had very little exposure to graphing and organizing information in their schooling experiences, they will have homework assignments where they survey the different types of litter they see within 1-2 blocks of their residence and record what they see over 1-2 weeks. They will be challenged to come up with different ways to collect data more efficiently (e.g. using tables, tally marks, etc.). They will keep a "trash journal" in which they record their own trash for several days.
Once we have compiled the data as a class, we will set up a "trash pizza." In this activity, students will decide on the major categories of trash that they have observed through their own monitoring of their trash (e.g. paper products, yard clippings, plastics, aluminum, food scraps, etc.). They will then figure out the percentages of each and compare them to the national percentages. Using this data, we will then design a pie chart by cutting out a thick cardboard circle, surrounding it with a paper maiche crust, and filling it with samples of the various types of trash (e.g., cut up pieces of newspaper, magazines, and office paper for the paper section, twigs and leaves for yard waste, etc.). This can be done in small groups with an adult assigned to each group to help with the materials. To tie this in with the theme of cycling, we will identify which categories of trash easily decompose and which ones do not.
We will also look at some statistics of local stores/fast food places (for example, how many cups of coffee are sold a day at Dunkin' Donuts) and figure out how much area that certain item of trash takes up in a landfill over a year.
Another way to integrate math would be to set up a system to weigh the class's trash at the end of each lunch. A fun way to get kids to reduce their trash would be to have a competition to reduce their waste to reach a certain goal weight, with a "trash-free" party that they could design as the prize.
To integrate geography, I will do a "world map input," in which I post a sketch of a world map and identify (using photographs and labels) different locations on the map where there are particular problems related to waste disposal (e.g., technology junkyards in Southeast Asia). This strategy is designed to expand students' understanding of world geography while they learn important current issues pertaining to the topic. I will also label the map with some statistics from different countries about amount of trash per capita. Students can take those numbers and create bar graphs to better visualize the discrepancies of the amount of trash coming from different parts of the world and how that relates to lifestyles.
For the literacy component of this unit, I will do a variety of read-alouds (listed in reading list) in which I model with "think-alouds" the reading strategies of questioning and determining importance. I will use expository texts that are related to the theme during small, guided reading groups in which we focus on pre-reading strategies for expository text (reading subtitles, captions, diagrams, etc.). Students will do a "scavenger hunt" for these features in a variety of texts. The unit will also include a series of poems and chants to be sung for daily shared reading and/or partner reading. These poems will include target vocabulary and key concepts from the objectives. Finally, students will create cause-effect charts which demonstrate their knowledge in written form of how specific types of trash harm the environment, or how recycling can positively affect the course of nature.
One final activity to help raise students' awareness of the trash problem is to have them participate in a clean-up of a section of a local street. Once they have cleaned it, I will take them out again two days later to observe how clean (or not) the street still is.
Finally, students will take action by writing persuasive letters to address an issue they have learned about. One example would be to have them write to businesses asking them to reduce the amount of packaging involved in their products. In my case, I will have students write letters to our school board requesting that recycling be implemented in every school. These letters can be either written individually or as a shared writing project, depending on the fluency of the students.