Introduction and Rationale
I teach Enrichment Math and Language Arts to the high achieving students selected primarily on the basis of their MAP test scores (NWEA - Measurement of Academic Performance). Our Enrichment program is structured as a pullout program with allocated class times ranging from 30 to 60 minutes for students in grades K-5. The premise that we operate on is, high achieving students often do not meet their expected target growth goals in the regular classroom particularly in subjects of their academic strength. In the regular classroom we often teach to the middle achievers and give that extra time and or focus to the lower achieving students.
Even with the expectations that we differentiate in our classrooms for all ability levels, high achieving students often get the short end of the stick. They tend to be able to work on their own or in a small group with little or no interaction with the teacher. Of course, this is not true in all cases but it is definitely a situation that exists and that we have recognized in our school district. The current approach is not always enough to get these students to move significantly beyond where they start at the beginning of the year. Our goal is to provide challenging material that will help them to meet or exceed their target growth goal.
As we implement a new Math curriculum this upcoming school year, I plan to integrate the content of this unit into the math curriculum in order to provide relevance to the math students are learning. This unit provides the opportunity for my students to have a practical application for the math they will be learning and understand how professionals use it in the field of science. Often my students have asked why they have to know how to do this or how they will use the math concepts and skills in the real world. The curriculum does not address this directly. This unit will address those questions as I integrate it into my math curriculum, using math as a quantitative and forecasting tool.
Part of our Language Arts curriculum involves being able to decode words for meaning using Latin or Greek roots and affixes. Specific words relevant to the topics of this unit lend themselves nicely to decoding according to their Latin or Greek origin. Another focus of our Language Arts curriculum is to read informative text which we don't do enough of in the regular classroom.
Content reading material from this unit will be used to address the informative text requirement of our enrichment curriculum. The academic focus of this unit will be geared toward my enrichment students in grades 5. However, I plan to adapt it for grades 3 and 4. The focus will be on math and language arts. The math focus will involve computation, recognizing patterns in number and predicting/forecasting, data gathering, generating graphs, interpreting data as it relates to an authentic situation, and evaluating data to determine the likelihood of an event or outcome becoming a reality. The language arts focus will be on reading informative text material; extrapolating key information to answer questions, draw conclusions, and make decisions; and decoding words for meaning.
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