This cluster includes the following access points.
Vetted resources educators can use to teach the concepts and skills in this topic.
| Name |
Description |
| Time Out on Tech: Part 2: | Using the case study, “Time Out on Tech,” students will identify the impacts of their digital device usage on behavior and discuss the impact that the internet has on the community. Students will research device usage information as well as use their research on their personal technology usage over a week from part 1 to address the research question: “How are devices helpful or hurtful to people in the community?” |
| Disaster Response Drone Missions: | Students will use multiplication and division of whole numbers to develop a plan to resupply a remote village with clean water after an earthquake. This is an open-ended engineering design lesson where students will develop a model to help them solve a problem. There are no “right” answers as the lesson is focused on the process of developing a solution and the skills and reasoning behind the process. Students should be given the freedom to interpret the problem and parameters in unique ways to pursue their own lines of thinking in producing a solution. |
| Who Represents Us? Part 3: | Students will present their representative campaigns created in Scratch to the class. They will take notes during each presentation. A mini-voting session will take place after all campaigns have been reviewed. This is the third and final part of an integrated computer science and civics mini-unit. |
| Getting to Know the Branches of Florida Government: | In this lesson, students will use word maps to differentiate between the three branches of government and become more familiar with the vocabulary. They will be tasked with creating a short comic strip depicted themselves teaching their understanding. |
| Civic Duties to the State and Nation: | In this lesson, students will make a claim supporting American’s civil participation as key to preserving the republic. They will write a claim that supports one of these two topics: the significance of public service or volunteerism. While writing an organized piece with resource-based findings, students will create a PowerPoint presentation of their findings. |
| Ocean Heroes: | Students will learn ways to help keep the ocean clean by recycling and write letters to lobby government officials to support recycling programs. They will decide which materials are most important to recycle by looking at several characteristics of the materials including whether they are renewable or nonrenewable, if the material will decompose, and the amount of the materials currently being recycled in this MEA.
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. |
| Rocks: | Students will use their knowledge of minerals and the rock cycle to analyze the rocks on three available sites for a new skate park. After analyzing each rock site, they will write a one page recommendation that will explain the classification of the rock and why it is the best for option for building. In addition, they will create a product plan that contains information on the rocks, their history and their uses. Student groups will present to fellow group members then each student will evaluate the products. |
| Cupid's Carnival Rides: | In this Model Eliciting Activity, MEA students will analyze different carnival rides to determine which ride would make the most profit by looking at factors such as number of tickets per ride, the cost per ticket, the length of the ride, the number of hours the ride is open, and the cost to operate the ride. Students will need to use different operations in order to solve the tasks and will be required to do multi-steps. |
| Writing a Claim with The Tale of Despereaux: | In this partial reading of Kate DiCamillo's story The Tale of Despereaux students will meet a variety of charming, and not so charming, characters. Students will identify figurative language within the text and explain how it contributes to understanding the characters. At the end of the lesson, students will make a claim about one of the characters and support their claim using text evidence. |
| If Animals Could Talk: Writing Fables: | In this lesson, students will analyze and discuss the characteristics and story lines of two different fables, "The Owl and The Grasshopper" and "The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse," and then write a fable of their own. |
| Aesop's Fable "The Lost Wig": | This lesson on Aesop's Fable "The Lost Wig" will provide students the opportunity to share and discuss their ideas of the fable’s theme. Students will work together in cooperative pairs to determine the theme "The Lost Wig." They will also have the opportunity to add on to the ending of "The Lost Wig" to enhance the theme. |
| Reading of The Life and Times of the Ant: | This lesson will provide an in depth look at informational text that is heavy with graphic features and links science to reading. By the completion of the lesson, the students will have studied the text features and text structure of an informational text. They will use information provided to explain an author’s claim. |
| Reading of the Folk Tale "The Sly Fox and The Little Red Hen": | This lesson will provide an in-depth look at the folk tale, "The Sly Fox and The Little Red Hen." By the completion of the lesson, students will have described the different character perspectives. They will also have written a new version of the folk tale based on the things they learned about the characters and that puts a twist on the original version. |
| Order Please!: | In this lesson, students will have an opportunity to learn about transition words. They willpractice editing sentences to include transitions and use these transition words in a writing activity. |
| Lead Me Into Exciting Writing!: | In this lesson students will practice creating a variety of introductions for narrative writing using fairy tales as the springboard. |
| Everglades Adventure: | Students will take notes about the Everglades using a variety of resources. Students will identify appropriate text features that can be used to convey information. As a final product, students will practice their expository writing by creating an informational brochure about the Everglades that uses the description text structure and multiple text features. |
| Using Varied Transitions: | In this beginning lesson on using transitional word and phrases, students will explore the use of varied transitions in a published book and then include varied transitions within their own short narrative writing piece. |
| Power of Perception!: | During the lesson, students will listen to the story, The Frog Prince, in order to write an argumentative essay using the theme of the story. The students are set to the task of writing an argumentative essay as well as practicing the skills of peer editing. The students will have an opportunity to share their argumentative writings with classmates. |
| The Chocolate Miracle: | In this lesson, students will briefly discuss background knowledge of the Berlin Airlift following World War II and then read Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot by Patricia A. Pierce. Students will then create a narrative story in which they describe an act of kindness. Students will utilize an editing checklist for giving and receiving peer feedback. |
| Patty's Party Planning: | In this Model Eliciting Activity, MEA, students will help a party planner determine which party location is the best one to use. They will calculate the cost of the banquet hall rental based on the number of people, number of tables and hourly rental of the location by using division and multiplication.
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. MEAs resemble engineering problems and encourage students to create solutions in the form of mathematical and scientific models. Students work in teams to apply their knowledge of science and mathematics to solve an open-ended problem, while considering constraints and tradeoffs. Students integrate their ELA skills into MEAs as they are asked to clearly document their thought process. MEAs follow a problem-based, student centered approach to learning, where students are encouraged to grapple with the problem while the teacher acts as a facilitator. To learn more about MEA’s visit: https://www.cpalms.org/cpalms/mea.aspx
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| Playground Protection: | In this Model Eliciting Activity, MEA students will decide which type of protective surface should be put in under a new playground unit. They will consider many factors before ranking their decisions about the best surface.
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. |
| Owl Moon: Similies and Metaphors: | In this lesson, students will be able to identify similes and metaphors within a piece of literature. Students will be able to determine the meaning of the simile or metaphor and explain how it contributes to the text. The students will be able to then use their understanding of similes and metaphors to apply them to their own narrative writing. |
| Planning Creative Drama: | This lesson introduces students to a creative and engaging way to understand story structure and elements of plot by allowing the students to write and act out a play. Students make selections from a provided list featuring various settings, characters, and conflicts and build their creative plays using a ready-made story feature template. |
| The Heart of a Lion: | In this lesson, the students delve into the world of understanding characters and how to develop them in their narrative writing. Students will develop a deeper understanding of characters as the class reviews character traits as well as the development of the main character throughout the story. In the final assessment, students will develop their own characters from picture form to written form to build understanding and deeper meaning of characters. Students will create a storyboard that allows for five to six pictures of a main character with an accompanying storyline that is organized with a clear beginning, middle, and end. They will additionally use digital writing tools to plan a narrative piece. |
| Illuminating Expository Research and Writing: | In this lesson, students will use resources from the classroom and the school media center to conduct research on a topic of their choosing. Students will then plan and draft an expository essay using their research as their sources. Their research will become the evidence that is cited in their text and what they use to inform their readers on their topic. Students will confer with classmates on expository planning and construction, and will give, as well as receive, critical feedback to other students to help them make their writing better. |
| Pollinators: | In this Model Eliciting Activity (MEA), students will be gien an engineering problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best pollinator for certain situations.
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. MEAs resemble engineering problems and encourage students to create solutions in the form of mathematical and scientific models. Students work in teams to apply their knowledge of science and mathematics to solve an open-ended problem while considering constraints and tradeoffs. Students integrate their ELA skills into MEAs as they are asked to clearly document their thought processes. MEAs follow a problem-based, student-centered approach to learning, where students are encouraged to grapple with the problem while the teacher acts as a facilitator. To learn more about MEAs visit: https://www.cpalms.org/cpalms/mea.aspx
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| Crazy about Corn: | In this lesson, students will use ears of corn to write a descriptive paragraph using adjectives to improve their writing. |
| Improving Writing with Strong Adjectives: | For this lesson, students will be able to improve their writing skills by generating ideas through brainstorming and group discussion, particularly as it relates to using more descriptive details. |
| Discovering Florida's Past with A Land Remembered (Lesson 1 of 2): | Explore the adventures of the MacIvey family with A Land Remembered Student Edition, Volume 1. Tag along as the family overcomes tragedy in the Florida wilderness while learning to use evidence in the text to support thinking. In this lesson students will learn about what life was like for pioneers in Florida. Students will relate to the characters by writing journal entries from a character's perspective. |
