Course Standards
General Course Information and Notes
General Notes
This course provides an introduction and applications to service-learning and civic responsibility. Academic, personal, and career skills needed for effective service-learning project implementation will be taught and applied through structured service projects that meet real school and/or community needs. Students will actively participate in meaningful service-learning experiences of at least 25 hours' duration.
The content should include, but not be limited to, the following:
- Students, working individually or in small or large groups, will investigate, quantify, and choose among issues and needs that can be addressed.
- Students will design and then implement one or more service-learning projects to address identified needs through direct, indirect, advocacy, or research-focused action. Projects will involve meaningful partnerships.
- Students will conduct reflection activities to measure and record information about the service-learning activities and their impacts.
- Students will demonstrate KSAs (knowledge, skills, or abilities) gained from projects through project-developed products and public presentations that educate others about the needs/issues addressed, activities conducted, impacts measured, and/or how others can also meet needs through service.
All of the above activities may be counted toward the service-learning 25-hour requirement. Activities can range widely and occur within or beyond the school and regular school hours. For more information about service-learning, see the Florida Department of Education Web site at www.fldoe.org/Family/learnserve.asp.
Mathematics Benchmark Guidance - Social Studies instruction should include opportunities for students to interpret and create representations of historical events and concepts using mathematical tables, charts, and graphs.
Language Arts benchmarks are addressed as students read, write, create documents, and make public presentations about needs and activities to address them. Social Studies benchmarks include analyzing community issues, coming up with solutions, and conducting service projects. Math benchmarks are met as students chart and graph data as part of issue investigation, project design, demonstration, and/or reflection. Health and Physical Education are addressed as projects include discussion and learning related to safety, liability, interpersonal skills, conflict avoidance, appraising outcomes and impacts on others, maintaining appropriate behavior, etc., in the students' interaction with others.
After successfully completing this course, the student will:
- Demonstrate an understanding of service-learning, the types of service-learning, and its importance in a participatory democracy.
- Demonstrate the ability to identify school/community needs and propose solutions that can be implemented through service-learning.
- Demonstrate the ability to identify and analyze different points of view to gain an understanding of diverse backgrounds and perspectives and their value.
- Demonstrate the ability to investigate significant needs, plan and implement service-learning projects to address them, evaluate project effectiveness, and present the information to an authentic audience.
- Demonstrate use of effective self-assessment and reflection strategies (e.g., verbal, written, artistic, and non-verbal activities to demonstrate learning, understanding, and changes in students' knowledge, skills and/or abilities).
- Demonstrate effective use of facilitative communication skills (e.g., writing, speaking, listening, questioning, paraphrasing, non-verbal communication, non-judgmental response).
- Provide documentation of activities and the minimum 25 hours of participation in one or more approved service-learning project.
For this second-level middle school course, the expectation is that students will not only conduct more service-learning hours than students in the first level but will also demonstrate responsibility and leadership in project investigation, design, and implementation.
Literacy Standards in Social Studies
Secondary social studies courses include reading standards for literacy in history/social studies 6-12, and writing standards for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects 6-12. This course also includes speaking and listening standards. For a complete list of standards required for this course click on the blue tile labeled course standards. You may also download the complete course including all required standards and notes sections using the export function located at the top of this page.
English Language Development ELD Standards Special Notes Section:
Teachers are required to provide listening, speaking, reading and writing instruction that allows English language learners (ELL) to communicate information, ideas and concepts for academic success in the content area of Social Studies. For the given level of English language proficiency and with visual, graphic, or interactive support, students will interact with grade level words, expressions, sentences and discourse to process or produce language necessary for academic success. The ELD standard should specify a relevant content area concept or topic of study chosen by curriculum developers and teachers which maximizes an ELL’s need for communication and social skills. To access an ELL supporting document which delineates performance definitions and descriptors, please click on the following link: https://cpalmsmediaprod.blob.core.windows.net/uploads/docs/standards/eld/ss.pdf
General Information
Qualifications
As well as any certification requirements listed on the course description, the following qualifications may also be acceptable for the course:
Any field when certification reflects a bachelor or higher degree.
Student Resources
Original Student Tutorials
Learn how to interpret histograms to analyze data, and help an inventor predict the range of a catapult in part 2 of this interactive tutorial series. More specifically, you'll learn to describe the shape and spread of data distributions.
Click HERE to open part 1.
Type: Original Student Tutorial
Learn how to create a histogram to display continuous data from projectiles launched by a catapult in this interactive tutorial.
This is part 1 in a 2-part series. Click HERE to open part 2.
Type: Original Student Tutorial
Learn how to calculate and interpret the Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) of data sets in this travel-themed, interactive statistics tutorial.
Type: Original Student Tutorial
Learn how to make and interpret boxplots in this pet-themed, interactive tutorial.
Type: Original Student Tutorial
Investigate the limiting factors of a Florida ecosystem and describe how these limiting factors affect one native population-the Florida Scrub-Jay-with this interactive tutorial.
Type: Original Student Tutorial
Learn what genetic engineering is and some of the applications of this technology. In this interactive tutorial, you’ll gain an understanding of some of the benefits and potential drawbacks of genetic engineering. Ultimately, you’ll be able to think critically about genetic engineering and write an argument describing your own perspective on its impacts.
Type: Original Student Tutorial
Practice identifying and examining the evidence used to support a specific argument. In this interactive tutorial, you'll read several short texts about the exploration of Mars to practice distinguishing relevant from irrelevant evidence. You'll also practice determining whether the evidence presented is sufficient or insufficient.
Type: Original Student Tutorial
Problem-Solving Tasks
Students are given a context and a dotplot and are asked a number of questions regarding shape, center, and spread of the data.
Type: Problem-Solving Task
Using the information provided, create an appropriate graphical display and answer the questions regarding shape, center and variability.
Type: Problem-Solving Task
Student Center Activity
Students can practice answering mathematics questions on a variety of topics. With an account, students can save their work and send it to their teacher when complete.
Type: Student Center Activity
Tutorials
In this video, you will see two ways to find the Mean Absolute Deviation of a data set.
Type: Tutorial
This video shows how to find the value of a missing piece of data if you know the mean of the data set.
Type: Tutorial
This video demonstrates how to construct a box plot, formerly known as a box and whisker plot.
Type: Tutorial
In this video, we organize data into frequency tables and dot plots (sometimes called line plots).
Type: Tutorial
Learn how to create histograms, which summarize data by sorting it into groups.
Type: Tutorial
Virtual Manipulatives
In this activity, students use preset data or enter in their own data to be represented in a box plot. This activity allows students to explore single as well as side-by-side box plots of different data. This activity includes supplemental materials, including background information about the topics covered, a description of how to use the application, and exploration questions for use with the Java applet.
Type: Virtual Manipulative
This is an online graphing utility that can be used to create box plots, bubble graphs, scatterplots, histograms, and stem-and-leaf plots.
Type: Virtual Manipulative
Users select a data set or enter their own data to generate a box plot.
Type: Virtual Manipulative
This virtual manipulative histogram tool can aid in analyzing the distribution of a dataset. It has 6 preset datasets and a function to add your own data for analysis.
Type: Virtual Manipulative
In this activity, students can create and view a histogram using existing data sets or original data entered. Students can adjust the interval size using a slider bar, and they can also adjust the other scales on the graph. This activity allows students to explore histograms as a way to represent data as well as the concepts of mean, standard deviation, and scale. This activity includes supplemental materials, including background information about the topics covered, a description of how to use the application, and exploration questions for use with the java applet.
Type: Virtual Manipulative