Classroom Activities
Classroom activities in this section will be broken down by the 5E model (engage, explore, explain, extend, and evaluate). The ideal unit would take five days (one day per each section). However, teachers should feel free to adjust to their classrooms needs. One example would be combining engage and explore in the same day as the engage activity should not take very long at all.
Engage
For the engage portion of the unit, students will examine three images individually and then analyze how they could all be connected. I will provide estimates of how long the activity should take, but feel free to adjust to the needs of your class. The three images are below and consist of a frog, people, and a coronavirus. In pairs/groups students will discuss what the first image is for two minutes. Then they will discuss the second image, and finally the third. After the three images have been looked at students will discuss for around four minutes how all three images are related.
Due to potentially having classes online, this lesson can be done in Zoom using the breakout feature. I suggest showing the students the three images and then sending them to breakout groups with the prompt sent out as a reminder. Another option is to have the three pictures presented on FlipGrid with students creating a personal response to what they think these three images represent and how they are related. A final step would be then to reply to a few classmates on what they posted. How to do that can be found here https://www.vanderbilt.edu/brightspace/how-to-use-breakout-rooms-in-zoom/#Step7
Explore
In the explore portion of the 5E model students have not yet been taught scientific vocabulary for the unit, they are just exploring and creating a hypothesis through carefully constructed questions. For this unit students will observe a set of objects at an observation station and will be given a real-world problem in which they will consider everything they know already and try and come up with a solution to the problem. The teacher should ask open-ended questions to help the students see all sides of the issue. Examples of open-ended questions for inquiry-based lessons are provided in the appendix. Students will have two scenarios to examine at the observation station. For the first scenario students will pretend they are herpetologists studying frogs in El Valle De Anton in central Panama. The teacher might want to provide a notebook or a piece of paper so students can write their ideas down. The golden frog was endemic to Panama and individuals were often found in abundance dating back to around 2004. However, they began to mysteriously disappear. At a table, students will find some toy frogs or a photo of the frogs which can be found on pexels.com and clues as to how the frogs died out. Students should write down their observations. Sentence stems should be provided for ESL students. An example sentence stem could be “I observed that….” At the second station students will read over information on how they can be Health Ambassadors to our communities. It’s important for this second scenario that the students look at facts on ways to prevent illness, keeping themselves and others healthy in their classroom community, and how to clean commonly touched areas, especially when returning to the classroom post pandemic. A response sheet will be filled out as they go in which they answer higher order thinking questions for this scenario. If you are teaching online, you can easily create a HyperDoc version of the observation station for both scenarios to share with your students on your Learning Management System.
An alternative activity for the explore portion (depending on your schools funding and impact of the pandemic in your state) could be to purchase a pet frog from a local pet store. Places such as PetSmart sell dwarf African frogs for around $5 as well as other breeds with prices around $40. Studies show that even local pet stores selling amphibians carry species currently infected with the chytrid fungus. A testing kit can be ordered from this website. This experiment could be teacher led or, again depending on funding and current pandemic levels, student led. You will need gloves, frogs (possibly one for each group, one per pair, or one for the whole class), and the same amount of testing kits as there are frogs. Directions are included in the testing kits, but essentially you take a cotton swab and swipe its belly (while wearing PPE). Students could predict which frogs will be positive and negative. Teachers can encourage the students to write their hypothesis down in a notebook and then share with a friend or the class.
Explain
This lesson is a teacher-directed lesson. Teachers will provide the students with background knowledge from the content background section explaining how emerging diseases in humans and animals have spread because of human interactions with the environment. I have created a PowerPoint that teachers can use for this lesson. The lesson should cover vocabulary words and concepts students need to know. Some examples of vocabulary words would be pandemic, epidemic, chytrid fungus, coronavirus, and SARS.
Extend
Students will read different articles in the extend lesson. Articles come from NewsELA and can be adjusted to student reading levels. The articles are “The impact of globalization on the physical and human characteristics of communities”, “The link between the coronavirus and wildlife”, and “Earth’s frogs are in danger, scientist learns reasons hard to figure out”. Students can be paired to read through the articles together. After the articles are read, students should complete a student response page. On the student response page students should have sentence stems available to them such as “I noticed”, “I wonder”, “The author wants the reader to think” or “I would like to know”, in order to create a few sentences or a paragraph (up to teacher discretion) in which the student develops thoughts on the articles read. I have included a sample student article response page in the appendix. If three articles are too many, you can encourage students to choose 2 out of 3 articles to write about. Another option would be to have students pick one article, write about it, and share their response with a student who wrote about a different article.
Evaluate
Students will develop an argument in this lesson. Students will be presented with the NewsELA article “New disease can destroy banana plants around the world”. Students should debate if they believe that humans caused the fungus to spread and predict the results of bananas contracting “Fusarium wilt”. Students will need to tie in there learning by citing information from previous lessons on how humans assisted in the spread of the frog pandemic and the SARS epidemic/pandemic. Students will be expected to write their thinking down and then present their argument in FlipGrid. Additionally, students will respond to one other classmate and state whether they agree or disagree with the student and why. If in person, students could present their opinion to small groups or the whole class by volunteer.
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