This cluster includes the following access points.
Vetted resources educators can use to teach the concepts and skills in this topic.
| Name |
Description |
| Gr 9-12. Everglades Restoration, Lesson 2: Our Changing Watershed : | Students will read a passage from Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: The River of Grass and compare the description with the present day Everglades. They will then look at the impacts from the US Army Corps of Engineers project and evaluate whether the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) addresses these issues. |
| Gr 9-12. Everglades Restoration, Lesson 3: A Look at CERP: | Students will analyze information about various current and ongoing CERP projects and report on the progress that is being made. |
| The Modernist Struggle: Allusions, Images, and Emotions in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock: | Students will research modernism, analyze allusions and images in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," diagnose the character's mental weakness using evidence from the poem, and write him an email about how to improve his state of mind from the perspective of a hypothetical online mental health professional. |
| Free Willy? An Argument Analysis of the Controversy over Captive Killer Whale Populations: | In this lesson, students will conduct several close readings of the article "SeaWorld, Activists Make Questionable Claims on Killer Whale Life Spans" by Jason Garcia. For the first close reading, students will focus on selected academic vocabulary. In the second reading, students will analyze the claims made in the article, focusing, in particular, on the validity of each claim made. During the final close reading, students will analyze the argument presented in the article, choose a side, and participate in a Philosophical Chairs discussion. |
| CollegeReview.com: | This is a model-eliciting activity where students have been asked by a new website, CollegeReview.com, to come up with a system to rank various colleges based on five categories; tuition cost, social life, athletics, education, city population and starting salary upon graduation. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| An Exploration of The Crucible through Seventeenth-Century Portraits: | After reading Act 1 of The Crucible in which 13 of the 21 characters are introduced, students create Trading Cards to describe and analyze an assigned character. Then they explore portraits of Puritans online to assist them in creating a portrait of the character and present a rationale to explain their work of art. A "Portrait Gallery" is set up around the classroom, so the students are able to refer to portraits during later acts and better understand the characters' motives and relationships. |
| Preserving Our Marine Ecosystems: | The focus of this MEA is oil spills and their effect on the environment. In this activity, students from a fictitious class are studying about the effects of an oil spill on marine ecosystems and have performed an experiment in which they were asked to try to rid a teaspoon of corn oil from a baking pan filled with two liters of water as thoroughly as possible in a limited timeframe and with limited resources. By examining, analyzing, and evaluating experimental data related to resource usage, disposal, and labor costs, students must face the tradeoffs that are involved in trying to preserve an ecosystem when time, money, and resources are limited. |
| Alternative Fuel Systems: | The Alternative Fuel Systems MEA provides students with an engineering problem in which they must develop a procedure to decide the appropriate course for an automobile manufacturer to take given a set of constraints. The main focus of the MEA is to apply the concepts of work and energy to a business model.
Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Technology vs. Ethics Debate: | Students will debate several controversial issues such as human cloning, use of performance enhancing drugs in sports, and space exploration in order to determine which they deem more important to society: technology or ethics. After brainstorming a list of issues and cutting it down to 8, students will be given 4 to 5 days to research the issues and prepare for the debate. Students will not know which side they are debating until the debate begins. The purpose of this exercise is for students to carefully consider both sides of issues, as well as alternatives, and to understand the importance of maintaining a healthy balance between ethics and technology.
After the debate,students will write about what they have learned in terms of the issues themselves, their team's performance in the debate, and whether or not their opinion has changed on any issue due to some important point made during the debate. |
| Ramp It Up: | Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct experiments to test the Law of Conservation of Energy and the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, stopwatches, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies, they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the relationships between mass, velocity, height, gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, and total energy as well as the relationships between mass, velocity, and momentum. |
| Forced To Learn: | Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct an experiment to test Newton's Second Law of Motion. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the direct relationships between force and mass; force and acceleration; and the inverse relationship between mass and acceleration. |
| Riding the Roller Coaster of Success: | Students compete with one another to design and build a roller coaster from insulation tubing and tape that will allow a marble to travel from start to finish with the lowest average velocity. In so doing, students learn about differences between distance and displacement, speed and velocity, and potential and kinetic energy. They also examine the Law of Conservation of Energy and concepts related to force and motion. |
| Tribal Tributes: Getting to Know Our Native American Ancestors Part 1 of 3: | The goal of Part 1 of this three-lesson mini-unit is to provide secondary students the opportunity to practice and apply research skills through a short research project on Native Americans. Students will work in collaborative groups to gather information on Native Americans from specific regions and develop and present a PowerPoint based on the research. |
| Narrative of the Captivity Close Reading: | Students will read and analyze the "Narrative of the Captivity" for Rowlandson's use of allusion as it contributes to the meaning of her account. In addition, they will identify and analyze the central idea and supporting details as they contribute to meaning. |
| Plants versus Pollutants Model Eliciting Activity: | The Plants versus Pollutants MEA provides students with an open-ended problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best plants to clean up certain toxins. This MEA requires students to formulate a phytoremediation-based solution to a problem involving cleaning of a contaminated land site. Students are provided the context of the problem, a request letter from a client asking them to provide a recommendation, and data relevant to the situation. Students utilize the data to create a defensible model solution to present to the client. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
