This unit centers around community-based engineering project and supported by STEM and ELA standards. Since it is intended for Sheltered English Immersion classroom, the unit summary outlines the language objectives and the lessons contain a thinking space for language used at the discourse, sentence, and word dimensions. This unit also promotes the idea that language instruction is necessarily embedded in any content area subjects and must be visible and explicit to all students. The purpose of this unit is to help the students develop the academic language through content-specific vocabulary and the Discourse Moves drawn from the WIDA research on Doing and Talking Math and Science (http://stem4els.wceruw.org/).
The embedded language development of this unit centers around three Key Uses of Academic Language:
By the end of this unit, the students will learn how to communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the content of English language arts, engineering, and math. They will also be able to communicate that a situation that people want to change or create can be approached as a problem to be solved through engineering. Another key transfer is the ability to ask questions, make observations, and gather information when thinking about problems.