Objectives
The state standards this unit will address include: designing and conducting investigations to demonstrate an understanding of scientific inquiry, demonstrating an understanding of technological design, conducting investigations to build an understanding of the atmosphere. This unit will specifically address evaluating how humans impact air quality and the financial and economic trade-offs involved with that. We will also be conducting investigations to explain the effects of environmental influences on human development and explaining how understanding human body systems can help make informed decisions regarding health.
My particular school is a 6 th - 8 th grade middle school with approximately 1200 students. I teach on an A day/B day block schedule and I typically have 26-32 students in a class, for an average total of 160 students. Middle school science classes in my district are heterogeneously grouped, which means that I can have the highest achievers, the learning disabled, and ESL (English as a Second Language) students all in the same class. This requires a great deal of creativity, differentiated instruction, and lots of planning. (A little bit of insanity helps, too.) This unit will utilize strategies that can be differentiated, used in small groups, and will lend themselves to whole class discussions easily.
The emphasis in middle school in our state has always been on math and language arts instruction. End of the year testing is focused on those two subjects. While we test in science and social studies, the scores on those tests do not count toward our accountability goals, so while there is less pressure on science and social studies teachers, we sometimes feel like we are teaching elective classes. The focus on math and language arts is also in the elementary schools, so science is taught "if there is time." Very often students come to middle school with little to no science background. Science content we used to assume middle school students would have when coming to middle school is no longer part of their prior knowledge. We now have to assume zero background in science content. One of the strategies I have employed in the last few years in an effort to make science more relevant in middle school is to create interdisciplinary units. I have learned how to engage other teachers in this and it has been successful for most of us. This unit will include several lessons that cut across the disciplines and will include: using inquiry, creating graphs, analyzing graphs, writing persuasive letters, conducting research, and conducting investigations.
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