Background on Unit 1

Throughout the year, I will be working closely with my current TUSD Connect fellow, Jen Smith, and former fellow, Lynn Okenwa, to help determine weekly agendas that will connect each unit's overarching concept into a variety of lessons using new instructional models to try and meet the requirements of the NGSS. Both Lynn and Jen were on the curriculum design team that met for a week in August to begin designing the day to day lessons in Unit 1. Together, we will reflect on the implementation of these lessons to hopefully help others in their transition to the NGSS.

In Unit 1, we will be focusing our lessons around the overarching concept  that "A cell, a person and planet Earth are each a system made up of subsystems."

We will start the unit by having students develop their own understanding of what it means to be living, nonliving, or dead. They will create a list of characteristics for living things and we will spend the first half of the unit going deeper into this topic. The organization of life will be used as the system to classify the levels of living things into subsystems. We will also spend several weeks discovering the characteristics of living things at the smallest living subsystem, cells (MS-LS1-1, MS-LS1-2, MS-LS1-3).

A transition to nonliving will occur after our microscopic investigations come to and end, studying the Earth system and the classification of the subsystems into Earth's four spheres. Students will make connections within and between Earth's spheres, looking at interactions and transfer of matter and energy (MS-ESS2-4, MS-ESS2-6).We will not take a deep dive into these topics in Unit 1, but will revisit these concepts in later units and in 7th grade.

We will end the unit by introducing the engineering design process and having students ask questions, define problems, and brainstorm solutions to the human impacts that have negatively impacted Earth's spheres (MS-ETS1-1, MS-ETS1-2).

Throughout this unit and the entire year, our focus is to try and create a student-centered culture in our classrooms that promotes student inquiry and requires students to formulate their own understandings rather than simply providing the information they need to know. We will also be focused on meeting the district's TUSD Connect Vision which is:

We will continue to focus on including and increasing the rigor of scientific literacy in our curriculum to meet individual school site writing goals and the goals of CCSS and the NGSS.

I want to mention how appreciative I am to Lynn and Jen for taking this huge risk of opening their classroom doors and sharing their reflections with the rest of us who are following along. Thank You!