Alien Earths

Introduction

English and Language Arts (ELA) in the elementary school setting is a comprehensive course that includes Reading, Grammar, Writing, Spelling, and more.  Revolving around communication, it encompasses a wealth of information, strategy and technique for the teacher and pupil.  The country is rife with school districts that have created a “block” of class time for the instruction of these subjects.  With the amount of content and practice that needs to be delivered and implemented, one might imagine it would be difficult to add more, however, this curriculum unit sets out to do just that.  The goal is to seamlessly incorporate the original ELA standards while infusing those from the field of Science, in order to make a rich and robust addition to the existing curriculum during which students will expand upon skills in pursuance of strengthening comprehension in not only non-fiction, which historically can be troublesome for young readers, but also creative writing within the Science Fiction genre.  Moreover, the students will be provided with the opportunity to transfer their stories into scripts for sharing with their peers.  In order to accomplish this goal, I will focus on vocabulary development along with comprehension skills paired with writing and science standards.

Teaching ELA may be extremely familiar for me, however, incorporating the Science standards is a new, but welcomed, endeavor.  Using the subject of Astrobiology as the foreground for such an endeavor will whet the students’ appetite for the segue into the writing genre of science fiction. 

For as long as I can remember, I have mused upon space and all of its possibilities: the distance, the wonder, the questions. As a child, I didn’t understand how “we were down here on Earth, but up in the sky at the same time.”  My young mind couldn’t wrap itself around the idea of the atmosphere and beyond.  Similarly, as an adult, there are still so many aspects that I continue to wonder about.  During my childhood, movies like “Star Wars,” television shows like “Star Trek” and cartoons like “The Jetsons” guided many of my mental depictions of how things worked in “outer space.”  Examining my musings even further, I recall movies like “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Cocoon.”  These films added a touch of Science Fiction to what I thought I already knew about space, its make-up and its possible habitants.  To even imagine what the planets were like was an absolute adventure.  I would ask, “if the sun and other stars like it are in space, why is it so dark?”  The truth is that there is so much that we still do not know and are learning about space that the science-fiction aspect is not that hard to drum up.

In this unit, I will examine many facets of the Universe as we know it, as well as a bit of the vast amounts that we don’t.  Discussions will revolve around the sun, stars, moon, Earth, the solar system and beyond.  Additional components will examine smaller features such as comets, asteroids and meteors.  Highlights will include exoplanets and dwarf planets.  All of these items are specifically chosen to partner with three guiding questions.

1. What is Life?
2. Do you think that there can be life elsewhere in the universe?
3. How do you envision life other than that on planet Earth?

These three questions will help students hone their current thinking of not only the science of space, but the idea of what is habitable and why?  They should be able to begin putting their thoughts and imagination together with facts and truths.

This unit will become a true integration of subjects in that the Scientific, non-fiction content will coalesce to form ideas for a writing within the science-fiction genre.  This will mesh with the subjects within ELA and provoke opportunities for not only writing, but script development as the students extrapolate their ideas from stories, to script, to stage!