Cluster 3: Integration of Knowledge and IdeasArchived

Students are presented with this scenario: A horrible forest fire has come through an ecosystem near you! Students will need to provide a detailed news article explaining the effect that this fire had on the food chain and how local citizens can help to restore the ecosystem. In addition to providing steps to rebuild, they must also convince readers that steps need to be taken in advance to prepare ecosystems for similar disasters.

Type: Lesson Plan

This MEA will deepen students' knowledge of the Bill of Rights through collaborative problem solving. Students are required to analyze data in order to recommend three Amendments to celebrate during a community festival.  They will perform operations with fractions and mixed numbers to recommend advertising options for the festival within a budget.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students analyze a weekly weather forecast to rank and determine which day would be best for flying a kite.

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.

Type: Lesson Plan

Help CSI determine the best canteen model to use by applying an understanding of comparing decimals.

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.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will have an opportunity to read the speech President Reagan presented on the evening of the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. Students will answer text-dependent questions individually, with partners, and in small groups and then write an expository essay.

Type: Lesson Plan

A close read of "Civil Rights on a City Bus" will engage students in a challenging text about Rosa Parks that requires them to determine the key points made in the article. Students will also have an opportunity to use context clues to define vocabulary words within the text. Upon completion of the close read activities, students will write an informative essay that provides evidence to prove each key point made by the author.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will learn all about bridges and become "engineers" as they read, comprehend, and infer text to determine the kinds of bridges that need to be built for a variety of scenarios.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will begin to learn about discrimination by analyzing how a narrator's or speaker's point of view can influence the way events are described in a story. Students will create a KWL chart, Venn diagram, and Character web, and then write an essay, all while working collaboratively to explore this important cultural issue.

Type: Lesson Plan

This model eliciting activity teaches students a common version of the scientific method by making them the judges of a science fair. In order to judge the science fair projects they have to evaluate the importance of each step of the scientific method and assign a value to it.

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.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will have an opportunity to read a portion of President Kennedy's speech to Congress about Space Exploration. Using Text Dependent Questions, students will discuss the speech with partners as well as a class and finally write a text based expository essay.

Type: Lesson Plan

This activity allows students to determine the types of items that should be in a hurricane survival kit, use a budget and calculations to determine the items to include in the kit and gain an understanding of hurricanes and the need to prepare for them.

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.

Type: Lesson Plan

This resource is a guided approach to researching for fifth graders. It assists in setting up a research framework for students to use as a guideline to completing a good research project.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson students learn about the American Civil War. Students will be required to use two or more texts to synthesize information into a coherent summary on some aspect of the Civil War as well as create a timeline of important events.

Type: Lesson Plan

This Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) is written at a 5th grade level. The Styrofoam Eliminators MEA provides students with an engineering problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best alternative to using Styrofoam trays in school cafeterias.

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.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will apply their knowledge of plant and animal adaptations to create an opinion writing piece. Students will write to convince a fictional nature show producer to film plants and animals in a habitat of the student’s choosing. Students will be assessed on elements of persuasive writing including: strong introduction/conclusion, logical sequencing, strong word choice, and supporting evidence.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson allows students to read and internalize information about solar power from the article "Solar-Powered Plane" from Time For Kids (1080L Lexile Level). After reading the article independently, discussing and answering the questions in pairs, the students get to go for a hunt around the classroom with a smartphone or scanner capable device to find the answers that are in the forms of QR Codes! This lesson can be completed in one 50 minute science block.

Type: Lesson Plan

This Engineering Design Challenge is intended to help fifth grade students apply the concept of how changes in an ecosystem can affect the survival of an animal species. Some suggested background building lessons are included, but it is not intended as an initial introduction to this benchmark.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will research causes leading up to the Revolutionary War and their specific effects. They will use various informational text resources to research a particular central event during this time period and place key points into a cause and effect graphic organizer. Working in small groups, they will compose a reader's theatre script depicting what they gathered in their research. They will rehearse and present their reader's theatre to their classmates.

Type: Lesson Plan

This two-lesson study of American History (Pre-Columbian North America) examines the ways in which geography shapes how people live. Part I of the study places emphasis on reading and writing about the early Native American tribes and the ways in which their geography (climate, landforms, natural resources) played a role in how they lived (food, clothing, shelter, tools, art).

Part II of the study requires students to take the knowledge they learned in Part I and apply it to the creation of an oral multimedia project (with a visual arts piece) that depicts how they would have lived in a country of their choice based on that country's geography.

Type: Lesson Plan

This Engineering Design Challenge is intended to help fifth grade students apply the concept of how structural and behavioral adaptations contribute to the survival of an animal species. Some suggested background building lessons are included, but it is not intended as an initial introduction to this benchmark.

Type: Lesson Plan

Anita Balance is a tightrope walker who is deciding to determine the location of her first big tightrope walk. Students must use their knowledge about climate to determine where the best/safest location (climate) will be to do her walk. This lesson provides opportunities for students to discuss how factors such as: precipitation, elevation and distance from the ocean affect climate.

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.

Type: Lesson Plan

The goal of this two to three day exemplar is to give students the opportunity to use the reading and writing habits they've been practicing on a regular basis to absorb deep lessons from Richard Feynman's recollections of interactions with his father. By reading and rereading the passage closely, and focusing their reading through a series of questions and discussion about the text, students will identify how and why Feynman started to look at the world through the eyes of a scientist. When combined with writing about the passage, students will discover how much they can learn from a memoir.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will determine the main ideas in two informational texts about the work and dreams of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. The culminating activity will require students to show understanding of the information presented and the relationship between the two men's dreams by 1) selecting one of three pieces of art to best represent their civil rights dreams, and 2) writing an opinion piece explaining their choice.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is an instructional routine for informational text in which teachers provide guided practice and students practice mapping details from multiple texts. Mapped details are used to analyze relationships and points of view from texts on the same topic.

Culminating activity options for this lesson include having students work in teams to create detailed geographical maps or write interactive dialogue to be performed for the class using props.

Type: Lesson Plan

Have you ever wondered why we have skin? What is the skins function for our body? In this lesson, students will identify the parts of the skin and its functions in conjunction with the integumentary system. Students will be exposed to an interactive diagram where the parts of the skin are displayed individually its functions are explained. Students will get hands-on by creating a 3-dimensional model of the skin and its parts.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students learn about American Civil War battles. Students will be required to use two or more texts to synthesize information about a battle of the Civil War. They will then use this information to write a letter as if they were present for the battle. Students will present their letters to the class.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is a five day lesson integrating Science, Reading and Writing. It is developed on a Reading lesson plan format using Shared Reading, Core Reading, Guided Reading and centers but can easily be transferred on to a Science 5E lesson format. The versatility of the lesson and the integration between subjects lends itself to it being widely used among teachers for different reasons; whether the teacher's need be in Science, Reading or Writing the lesson provides opportunities for all areas to be addressed. Most importantly, it offers the busy teacher an opportunity to implement one lesson to cover three subjects.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will analyze the artist's tone in the painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware, December 1776." Using the same techniques of looking at the details, students will analyze the tone of the primary account and secondary account in the informational text "Washington Crosses the Delaware, 1776" to gain an understanding of how authors create tone in their writing. The culminating activity will require students to demonstrate an understanding of their study of point of view, tone, and information presented in "Washington Crosses the Delaware, 1776" by writing a historically accurate first-person memoir of the event in which the tone reflects their perspective of the event.

Type: Lesson Plan

Water, Water Everywhere! Research the Water Cycle asks students to conduct their own research on the water cycle (hydrologic cycle). Working collaboratively in small groups, students will research and write about the relationships between stages in the water cycle and the three states of matter relating to water. After completing this lesson, students will be prepared to create a model of the water cycle.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will explore samples to determine properties of components of mixtures. Over the course of the exploration, the teacher will guide the students to discover what sets a solution apart. Access points included.

Type: Lesson Plan

This resource kit provides teachers engaged in lesson study with exemplary content background, unit and lesson plans, assessment items and tasks, and informational texts, related to the teaching and learning of diversity and evolution in grades 3-5. Complete with links to activities and lessons as well guiding questions, this resource kit contains all of the materials that a team would need to construct a unit of instruction that fully aligns to the academic standards for science, while supporting the informational text component of the standards for English language arts.

Type: Lesson Study Resource Kit

Read about the sinking of the Titanic and learn to identify key ideas in multiple texts, review similarities and differences between those key ideas, and identify the difference between important and interesting key ideas. This interactive tutorial will help you integrate information from several texts on the same topic.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Learn how to draw information from multiple print sources to locate an answer to any research question quickly.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

In this activity, students will locate text features and explain how they help the reader understand the text.

Type: Student Center Activity

This resource is provided by , a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and encourages students to look critically at advertisements.

These activities will help students:

• learn to conceptualize advertisements as texts that can and must be critically read.
• develop explicit strategies for reading and interpreting advertisements.
• recognize that advertisements are constructed messages.

Type: Teaching Idea