Implementation Plan

IMPELMENTATION:

Curricular Unit/Project Outline: Focus on goal, student skills, general content, teaching methods, and assessment ideas.

Our goal is for students to connect science to the world in which they live. The team has outlined collaborative group projects based on the first-hand knowledge we will have gained through our study of animals and their place in the ecosystem and the geological origins of the four national parks we will visit.

To introduce our students to these units, both grades will interact with real-world texts, reading portions of the National Service’s Call to Action report in order to learn how the Park Service is trying to connect young people to their national parks.

Sixth grade students will research animals and their ecosystems noting how other animals living within an ecosystem are connected to each other. Animal assignments will include the brown bats, wolves, bison, elk, moose, marmots, big horn sheep and the Yellowstone cutthroat trout. Groups will research the classification of the assigned animal, the essential components of habitat, estimated population, and limiting factors facing each population. Groups will then come to a consensus and make a recommendation on a real-world problem they are presented facing the continued health of the population of their assigned animal.

Eighth grade students will identify and illustrate the unique geological features in a national park, including glaciers, volcanic activity, and erosion and deposition. Research questions will include the unique geological feature of the park and the force responsible for its creation, things to do when visiting the park and things visitors should know about the particular park when planning a visit. Then students will research and come to a consensus about a question facing the park requiring compromise by the parties involved and giving suggestions for a resolution.

To create an inter-disciplinary structure for this unit, groups of four students will be formed in sciences classes where planning and research will occur. Students will then conduct research projects to answer questions, drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions that allow for multiple avenues of exploration. In the language arts classes, students will conduct individual research to contribute to the group project. As students read their selected sources, they will trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, distinguishing claims that are supported by facts and evidence from claims that are not. We will also teach students to think critically about the quality of the evidence presented in real-world texts.

Presentations will be evaluated by both the science and language arts teachers in combined class periods where the students’ ideas will have a larger audience. Both sixth and eighth projects will be posted on Our National Parks blog so that classmates, parents, and the community can follow our progress.

During National Park Week in April when the weather improves the sixth grade classes will join with the eighth grade classes for an outdoor activity supporting the investigation the sixth grade students have done in the current year and reviewing what the eighth student learned two years earlier about the animals and their ecosystem. We will assign the eighth grade leadership roles in the organization of the activity. Using the “Oh, Dear” activity, from Project WILD, K-12 Activity Guide, from the Council for Environmental Education, 1992, students will become a deer, or a resource, or a predator in a game where survival depends of available resources, disease, and impact of weather, accidents, environmental pollution, habitat destruction, and the evasion of predators in the environment. These variables will be changed with successive rounds of the game allowing students to record results in terms of the deer population and then they will return to the classroom to choose a graph which best represents the results.