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 Grade, students had experience designing animations using the programming language Scratch Jr.  This unit will build upon those experiences by teaching students how to create more complex programs.  After several activities to teach students about loops / repeating commands, number patterns, and computer science, students will create two types of video games: a simple “sweep the grid” style game where an object moves across every square on the screen, and a more complex game with controls, obstacles, and multiple triggers.  Students will use the terminology of computer programming and get experience in debugging.

The concepts introduced in this Unit -- variation of traits and inheritance -- may not seem like major ideas in Science, but in fact they form the foundation for understanding evolution and genetics, two pillars of Biology,  in later grades.  Students will use texts and photos to collect evidence for the fact that traits vary both across species, and within species.  They will read about how traits are inherited from parents and passed to offspring, and will then model possible combinations of traits in offspring, given the traits in parents.  They will then use models of family trees showing traits to answer a question about why one wolf in a pack is a different color and size from all the other wolves in the pack.

Finally, through more texts and examples, students will conclude that many traits are influenced by both inheritance and the environment.

In this unit students explore various forces (pushes, pulls, gravity, magnetism, and friction) in order to build a strong understanding of how forces interact to cause objects to move, stay still, or change course.  The unit is framed around explaining how a maglev train can actually float on air as it goes cruising down a track at high speeds.  Over the course of the unit, understanding and explanations are developed through hands-on experiences, discussions, reading informational text, and writing detailed scientific explanations.  The unit is focused on building students’ ability to develop models (physical models and force diagrams), construct explanations (written, verbal, and visual), and obtaining and evaluating information (through reading a variety of texts). 

Weather is one of the most pervasive phenomena humans interact with on a daily basis, and it has a profound impact on how all organisms on Earth live.  In the role of meteorologists working for the fictional Wildlife Protection Organization (WPO), students will investigate weather patterns as they solve the problem of where to establish an orangutan reserve. Students will learn that orangutans live on Borneo and Sumatra—some of the hottest and rainiest places on Earth—but the development of palm oil plantations is rapidly deforesting their habitats. The students’ job is to analyze the weather on three fictional islands in order to determine which has weather most like the locations where orangutans live and recommend one island to the WPO for the reserve. As they progress through the unit, students become increasingly adept in making sense of the data that is necessary to accurately describe the weather of a given location over time. They figure out how meteorologists collect, analyze, and represent weather data for one day, followed by one month, and finally, an entire year. Using digital modeling tools and support from the unit’s books, students figure out that weather follows patterns over time and across space, and they use these patterns to make predictions about future weather. By the end of the unit, students are able to use their best evidence to support written scientific arguments for the location of the reserve.  Finally, students shift from when weather patterns occur to thinking about where different weather events happen repeatedly as they investigate the question, How can the WPO prepare for natural hazards that might damage their offices? As students plot natural hazards and temperatures on maps, they discover a spatial pattern to the weather. They read to find out how people prepare for natural hazards, and then design, build, and test model hurricane-resistant structures.