Electricity powers our modern world, but how often do we stop to think about where our electricity comes from when we turn on a lightswitch or use a hairdryer? This unit explores various concepts of energy as students discover how our electrical system works. Students will take on the role of systems engineers to solve the issue of frequent blackouts that are occurring in a fictional town called Ergstown. 

Students will learn to identify different forms of energy all around them, and how it gets converted from one form to another. They will work to discover how electrical systems work through hands-on experiences, readings, and simulations. Students will apart simple electronic devices to expose them to a variety of electronic components, and demystify electronics. They build basic electric circuits using a variety of materials and components, making their own conductors and switches, as well as their own projects. 

They move on to learn more about where electricity comes from, including renewable vs non-renewable energy and how a city power grid works, ultimately building their own energy source converter: a wind turbine!

The purpose of this unit is to build students’ knowledge and skills in the foundations of Computer Science (CS).  Students who were with us for Kindergarten and 1st Grade will have had exposure to CS through their work with the kid-friendly robot called the Beebot, where they explored the sequential nature of computer programs by programming the Beebot to move across number lines and rectangular arrays in specific ways to solve “challenges.”

In 2nd and 3rd Grade, students had experiences designing animations and video games using the programming language Scratch Jr.  This unit will build upon those experiences by teaching students how to create more complex programs using Scratch, a more powerful programming language.  Students explore a variety of game designs such as side-scrolling, obstacle avoidance, and chasing, before they create their own game and tweak the design to make it as fun as possible.

Over the course of this unit, students investigate the role that animal senses, primarily vision, play in survival as they try to understand a realistic fictional problem with a real organism. They will be conservation biologists as they investigate why there is a decline in the number of Tokay geckos living in one area of a rainforest in the Philippines. Humans change the environments in which we live many ways—clearing forests to make roads and build houses, removing species of plants and animals that are dangerous to humans, installing lights to make it easier to see at night, and so on. Often these changes affect other species’ survival in unanticipated ways. Examples of this are changes humans make to the environment that impact how animals in the same environment are able to use their senses to get information. 

Throughout their investigations, students use an interactive digital simulation that allows them to explore two key ideas: how light travels in a way that allows an animal to see and how an animal’s internal structures work together to process information and form an image the animal can recognize. In addition, students engage in hands-on activities, reading, and discourse as they learn how animal eyes function, discovering that some animals see well in bright light and others see well in low light. 

In the last chapter of the unit, students design and complete their own investigations about human smell, hearing, or touch. Woven throughout the unit is a focus on the crosscutting concept of Structure and Function.

Rocks are lifeless and boring. WRONG. The Earth’s Features (and rocks specifically) tell an elaborate story about how the Earth was around BILLIONS of YEARS before humans walked around. Students will learn the basics of how to interpret that story by learning about sedimentary rocks (this unit doesn’t get involved with other types of rock). Here’s how:

In the role of geologists, students investigate how a dinosaur fossil found in Grand Canyon National Park formed, which serves as the anchor phenomenon for the unit. Students make inferences about the history of the park based on the fossil itself and the rock layers in which it is embedded. Investigating how the fossil formed leads students to learn about sedimentary rock formation. Students use books, hands-on investigations, and the Earth’s Features Simulation to figure out how fossils and sedimentary rock form and how different sediments build up in different environments, forming different rocks in those environments. This helps them learn how to tell the environmental history of a place by observing the rock layers present. Finally, in an effort to explain a new anchor phenomenon, why two different canyons in the fictional Desert Rocks National Park have different amounts of exposed rock, students figure out that rock can be broken down and layers can become exposed by things in the environment, such as water.