standard 1.6

At SPARK Academy, we believe content should be shared with students in a way that encourages discovery, while, at the same time, challenges students to solve real-world problems. It is critical that our students are able to make connections across disciplines and make sense of the world around them.

Our grade level curriculum is strategically designed to focus on STEM topics throughout the school year. When SPARK Academy was first established, the faculty made a deliberate decision to create a year-long unit plan driven by science standards. Traditionally, our school district has been driven by a reading pacing guide, influenced heavily by the reading textbook that was adopted by the school district. Since SPARK was developing an innovative program, our faculty was given the freedom to develop our own interdisciplinary units, driven by the Alabama Course of Study Science Standards.

Grade level teachers meet each spring to map their standards for the following year. We begin with the science big ideas for each nine-week quarter and place our science standards. The order is determined by the grade level, taking time of year (studying plants in the spring, rather than in the winter) and developmental and skill development of students into consideration. We take printouts of each grade level standards and physically cut and place the standards into the appropriate place on a giant themed chart. Once we have placed the science standards into the appropriate unit, teachers then do the same for each of the other curricular areas in the Course of Study. Again, the placement of each standard is influenced by the science focus of the unit. For example, the measurement standards in math are often placed in the plant study unit. When our grade levels do not have a science focus for a unit, teachers integrate engineering into the unit. For example, kindergarten does not have enough science standards to sustain a year’s worth of learning, so our teachers have a unit that focuses on fairy tales and they incorporate an engineering challenge with each story they teach. We are able to provide all of our stakeholders with a yearly overview of our grade level themes each year.

This year, two of our four kindergarten teachers are relatively new to the school and/or grade level, so the teachers asked for time this fall to remap their standards, allowing the new teachers the chance to participate in the process and the veteran teachers the chance to reflect on what has not been as successful in the past. Our administration provided a day of substitutes for the grade level teachers, allowing them time during the day to work with our building’s Instructional Partner, STEM Specialist, and administration. As a result, the kindergarten teachers were able to create a plan for the remaining units for the 2019-2020 school year and were able to collaboratively develop their next unit of study, with priority and supporting standards and a calendar of activities for the unit. The photo below shows one of our kindergarten teachers placing a reading standard into the animals unit of study.

Our planning charts are then converted to digital documents and shared on our school’s shared drive, allowing all teachers in the school access to the documents at any time. Teachers then use those documents to identify priority and supporting standards for unit development. Again, since all teachers have access to these documents, our specialists and resource teachers can view each grade level’s priority and supporting standards and incorporate those into their teaching as well.

Planning then moves to identifying success criteria, assessments, tasks, and a calendar of activities and concepts. Below are examples of the work our kindergarten team did as they planned their upcoming unit on animals.

One specific example of a completed unit that went through this design process is our third grade unit on the Iditarod Dog Sled Race. This unit was created for two reasons: first was the desire to develop an additional interdisciplinary unit to teach about animal adaptations needed for species survival; the second was student and teacher interest. Since the grade level was studying animals and plants during the same time as the Iditarod Race in Alaska, the teacher who developed and piloted the unit felt that it would be a natural real-world connection that the students could make with the content they needed to learn and apply many of the skills they had already explored. The priority standards for the unit focused on science, social studies, and reading, while the supporting standards included writing, science, and math, allowing a comprehensive investigation of animal characteristics across all curricular areas.

As part of this unit, students Skyped with naturalists at Denali National Park and with mushers who race dog sleds to learn about sled dogs and packing sleds from experts. As students read about the Iditarod Race, they used map skills to track their musher, built models of dog paws and human hands, calculated elapsed time as mushers arrived and left checkpoints, and packed model sleds.

This unit was so successful in the pilot year, that all of our third grade teachers will be implementing this unit during the winter of 2020.

One of the strengths of our team interdisciplinary planning is that our teachers are continually revising and improving our units and plans. Each grade level has time in late spring to refine their curriculum plan, continuing to improve their learning experiences and tasks, with the flexibility to work on curricular areas as needed by the grade level. Our district also provides ongoing professional development to assist with making our units more engaging and rigorous. We continue to strive for real-world, age appropriate challenges for our students to explore and solve.