How the World Works

How do human societies impact the natural world? How does the natural world impact human societies? In Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Coretta Scott King Award-Winning historical fiction novel, 9^th Ward, readers come to know Lanesha—a girl with special gifts whose love and resiliency carries her and her loved ones through an American tragedy. Scholars will have an opportunity to discuss how the natural world and its laws can have tragic and profound effects on communities using the 9^th Ward as a case-study. Natural disasters can also surface underlying social justice issues —as evidenced by the divide between Lanesha (and her 9^th Ward Community) and her estranged relatives in the wealthier Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans. This text is a coming-of-age novel in which Lanesha harnesses the hope and strength of family to confront both the hurricane and a devastating personal loss.

This unit is centered around decimals and their relationship to fractions. We will be focusing on converting fractions to decimals, ordering decimals, and adding decimals. We will be sharing our thinking through various models and discussion. Scholars will effectively communicate when it comes time to share and reflect on their ideas or strategies. Scholars will also increase their ability to responsibly research resources around our classroom.

In our unit on How the World Works, Grade 4 scholars will be focused on writing a variety of expository and narrative compositions, revising, and editing. Sample writing topics include, creating an Awareness Poster project connected to the wildfires in Australia and identifying one of the three social issues Martin Luther King Jr. sought to eradicate.

In this unit we will be discovering how the world works in several ways. We will be working in partnership with the Perot Museum in our classroom to explain how all matter has certain properties and how to classify matter by physical properties, including shape, relative mass, relative temperature, magnetism, and ability to float or sink. Students will also be identifying samples as solid, liquid or gas.

We will be discovering how our world works through the movement of the Earth in our solar system and how this affects our seasons, weather, and climate. The scholars will be gathering data on the weather and how this affects our choices on a daily basis.