Unifying Concept: Journeys and Explorations / Reading Focus: Informational / Writing Focus: Opinion
Overview: In this unit the students will journey through different stories, memories, and places through different literature and informational text. The students will explore how stories can take us places around the world without even leaving our classroom. The students will explore their memories as well as family stories to begin looking at different parts of their lives that shape our culture and traditions. The students will create memories for characters that have forgotten their own, create a memory museum of their own life, and learn about where their family comes from and family memories. The students will then explore places from around the world and decide which place they like best. The students will create a brochure telling about a place they would be interested in visiting. The students will gain understanding of the more we explore the world and ourselves the better understanding we will have. This unit will lay the foundation of an interconnected world.
Purpose: With guidance from the AZCCRS, this unit allows students to interact with grade level appropriate literature and informational text focusing on multicultural connections between books, characters, places and ourselves. This unit will allow students the opportunity to learn about their own heritage, traditions, and culture while understanding differences they may have with others. Students will use writing techniques they have learned throughout the school year to create memories, write about their family and study places from around the word. Students will understand that everyone is different and those differences are what make us interesting to learn about.
Enduring Understandings:
Journeys and explorations help us build new thinking about the world, its people and their ideas, and ourselves. / Essential Questions:
1. What obstacles do characters face during a journey and what lessons are learned?
2. What do we need to have a successful journey?
3. How do authors take us on journeys or help us explore the world?
Target standards are emphasized during the quarter and used in a formal assessment to evaluate student mastery.
Highly-Leveraged1 are the most essential for students to learn because they have endurance (knowledge and skills are relevant throughout a student's lifetime); leverage (knowledge and skills are used across multiple content areas); and essentiality (knowledge and skills are necessary for success in future courses or grade levels).
K.RI.2 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.
K.W.1 Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is . . .).
Supporting are related standards that support the highly-leveraged standards in and across grade levels.
K.L.5a Sort common objects into categories to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent.
Constant Standards are addressed routinely every quarter.
K.RL.1,4,5
K.W.4,8
K.SL.4,5,6
K.L.2a
Selected Readings of Complex Texts
Extended/Short Texts:
Walk Through the Jungle Unknown
Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge Mem Fox / Multicultural Adoptions:
Alfredito Flies Home Jorge Argueta
All the World Liz Scanlon
Performance Assessments:
Formative Assessments:
Student response to literature.
Important Poem: Students will write a poem about memories based on the Important Book,The, Margaret Wise Brown.
Missing Memories: After reading the book, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, Mem Fox, students will write missing memories for the characters who have forgotten their own.
Group/Individual Thinking Maps to Outline/summarize stories and ideas. / Summative Assessments:
“My Journey” Book: This book is created one page a day with the students making connections to the read materials. The pages will be collected and bound into a book at the end of the unit.
Memory Museum: Students will present their writing projects in a classroom museum set up.
Travel Brochure: At the end of the unit, students will be selecting a location they would like journey to and create a travel brochure to persuade others to want to explore there.
ELA, Office of Curriculum Development © Page 2 of 2