In this unit, students work collaboratively to build their dream playground. They design it on paper, build a lego prototype of it, and learn how important fitness is for the human body, and how fitness can be fun!

In this unit, students will develop the ability to design simple programs (sequences of instructions) and implement them with a simple kid-friendly robot called a Beebot. Students’ goal is to use a Beebot robot to model how bees and flowering plants depend upon one another to meet their needs. Students will explore the sequential nature of computer programs by programming the Beebot to move across number lines and rectangular arrays in specific ways to solve “challenges.”  At the same time, they will learn about how bees and flowers depend upon one another to meet their needs. They will begin on Day 1 by learning about the relationship between bees and flowers, and exploring the functions of the Beebot.  They will then solve challenges with simple forward and backward commands on a number line, and use subtraction and addition to help them do so, in the context of moving the bee to a flower and back to its hive.  After several days, they will move on to solving more complex challenges on rectangular arrays, using the turn commands in addition to the forward and backward commands.  They will be introduced to the concepts of “debugging” by being given erroneous command sequences to correct.

In this unit, students learn that the primary source of light on Earth is the Sun. The Sun is the star at the center of our solar system. Students will learn that stars, including the Sun, generate their own light, while objects such as the moon reflect that light.  Throughout the module, students will document patterns as they observe the Sun, moon, and stars. The ability to recognize patterns is an important scientific skill that researchers use to develop explanations of observations in nature. Students explore what the sky looks like during the daytime and the nighttime. They examine Earth as a round, ball-shaped planet and develop an understanding of the orientation of Earth and the sun in space, allowing them to figure out that daytime and nighttime are the result of Earth facing or not facing the sun. Students explore the position of the sun in the sky throughout the day and notice the arc-like pattern that the sun makes in the sky during the daytime. They explore what they see in the sky at sunset, closely examining the change from daytime to nighttime. They gather data that shows that these patterns repeat from one day to the next in an ongoing cycle. Students develop an understanding that Earth is always spinning to explain these patterns.  Next, students investigate why the lengths of daytime and nighttime change throughout the year, drawing conclusions about seasonal differences of daytime and nighttime.