Reading/Writing

Math

Science

Social Studies

September

Unit 1 - Building Background Knowledge: The Lost Boys of Sudan Students begin reading A Long Walk to Water, focusing on setting, themes, and how an author develops and contrasts the points of view of different characters in a text.

Unit 1 - Scale Drawings

Students will study scale drawings of real-world objects and learn about scale factors.

Unit 1 - Chemical Reactions and Matter

This unit develops science ideas around properties of substances, matter, & chemical reactions.  Students draw from their understanding of mass and matter to determine if a new substance is made in a reaction. Overall, students wonder and explain what happens when a bath bomb is in water.

Unit 1 - North America: Modern Immigration: US, Mexico, and Middle America

Students will learn the history of Middle American countries primarily Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico and explore the issues that surround the debate around illegal and legal immigration.

Unit 2 - Write to Inform: The Lost Children of South Sudan Students read informational texts to identify central ideas and answer questions about A Long to Water.  Students plan and draft a compare and contrast essay focusing on A Long Walk to Water and one of the informational texts they read.

Unit 2 - Introducing Proportional Relationships

Students will recognize and represent proportions including  identifying unit rates in tables, graphs,  equations.

October

Unit 3 - Write to Raise Awareness: The Lost Children of South Sudan Students compare A Long Walk to Water with the audiobook version, exploring how authors and readers develop tone, mood, and expression.  They then plan, draft and complete a narrative children’s book about a Lost Boy or Girl of Sudan.

Unit 2 - Chemical Reactions and Energy

This unit builds from the prior bath bombs unit about chemical reactions, while incorporating science ideas about energy. This unit provides students a design challenge by incorporating science and engineering ideas. Overall, students examine how prepackaged food called Meals, Ready-to-Eat (MREs) work and how they help within an emergency.

November

Unit 1 - Build Background Knowledge: Solving Medical Epidemics Students are introduced to the anchor text Patient Zero and examine text features and structures as well as practice determining the meanings of words and phrases, especially technical terms associated with epidemiology.  They also investigate how scientists solve medical mysteries.

Unit 3 - Measuring Circles

Students will apply what they learned about proportional relationships to measuring circles.  They will learn about radius, diameter, circumference, and area of circles.

Unit 3 - Metabolic Reactions

This is a life science unit that builds science ideas around chemical reactions and human body systems.  Students will zoom in and out of different parts of the body to look at molecules, cells, and organs.  Specifically students examine a real case study of a middle schooler struggling to keep food down. As students examine her symptoms, they piece together her unusual condition.

Unit 2 - Eastern Europe: Past and Present: Soviet-Russian Transition

Students will explore Eastern Europe with a focus on the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

December

Unit 2 - Write to Inform: Are Social Epidemics Real? Students read various articles about social epidemics and practice summarizing central ideas as well as delineating and evaluating claims.  Students plan, draft, and revise an informative essay,

Unit 4 - Proportional Relationships and Percentages

Students will deepen their understanding of proportional relationships and percentages.  

January

Unit 3 - Spread the Message: How to Respond to Epidemics Students analyze model podcasts and podcasts scripts before planning, writing and creating a podcast.

Unit 5 - Rational Number Arithmetic

Students will add, subtract, divide and multiply positive and negative numbers, including fractions.

Unit 4 - Matter Cycling and Photosynthesis

In this unit, students investigate how plants and animals get their food and how food molecules are processed and used in animals and plants.  Students work to understand how matter and energy cycles between animals and plants.

February

Unit 1 - Collaboration in the Harlem Renaissance Students compare musical and textual techniques in the play Shuffle

Along and how these techniques affect meaning and develop themes.  They also analyze structure, language, and theme within poetry.

Unit 3 - The Middle East and North Africa: Foreign Involvement in the Region

Students will explore the Middle East through its geography, history and culture while incorporating current events throughout.

Unit 2 - The Context of the Harlem Renaissance Students read short stories and analyze point of view and the interactions

between story elements such as character, plot, setting, and themes about working hard to achieve dreams and how

community helps to bring out our best selves. Students finish the unit by writing pair and independent essays, discussing how three pieces of work from the Harlem Renaissance are connected by themes.

March

Unit 3 - The Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance Students study several of Nikki Grimes’ poems, analyzing them for structure, figurative language,

and theme.  Students culminate the unit by writing a curator’s statement and label then practice their presentation before presenting their exhibit in the Harlem Renaissance

museum by sharing these important works with their community.

Unit 5 - Ecosystem Dynamics & Biodiversity

This is a life science unit that builds science ideas around biodiversity and ecosystems. Specifically, students first examine how people buying candy bars can have a ripple effect on dwindling orangutan populations. Students then investigate other activities that either increase or decrease the biodiversity within an ecosystem.

Unit 6 - Expressions, Equations and Inequalities

Students will add, subtract, factor and expand expressions and solve problems using expressions and equations.

April

Unit 1- Build Background Knowledge: What is Plastic Pollution? Students study the documentary A Plastic Ocean, analyzing the film’s main

ideas and supporting details, as well as how the ideas in the video introduce the issue of plastic

Pollution.  Students are then introduced to the anchor text Trash Vortex and learn to analyze the text for how the author distinguishes her

position from that of others.

Unit 2 - Take a Stand: Ways to Reduce Plastic Pollution Students read articles and revisit their anchor texts to understand

what interventions can be taken at each stage of the plastic life cycle.  Students practice analyzing how authors develop their points of view as well as how different

authors writing about the same topic shape their presentations of key information.  Students complete the unit by writing essays about reducing pollution.

Unit 6 - Earth’s Resources & Human Impact

This unit builds science ideas around Earth’s resources and human impact, specifically, related to why our communities are experiencing more droughts and floods.

Unit 4 - East Asia: Post-Cold War: Japan, North and South Korea

Students will compare the  results of communism vs. democracy with a focus on North Korea, South Korea and Japan and why the Korean situation became a global crisis.

May

Unit 7 - Angles, Triangles, and Prisms

Students will investigate the relationships of angles and side lengths in triangles.  They will study and apply angle relationships such as “complementary” and “supplementary.”  Finally, they will solve problems involving area, surface area, and volume of prisms.

Unit 3 - Spread the Message: We Can Make a Difference! Students write a documentary script, create a storyboard and then pitch a part of their documentary script to an audience of their peers.

June

Unit 8 - Probability and Sampling

Students will work with statistics in order to understand generalizations that can be made from random sampling and comparing sets of data using random sampling.  Students will also develop, use and evaluate the probability of chance events.