Unit Portfolio Presentation Kate Yaun Kathy Kellner

Unit Summary The Great Bean Race is on! Compete with classrooms from other regions to see which collaborative team can grow the tallest bean plant. Controlling for certain variables (including growth time and bean seeds), seven or eight teams in each classroom design and conduct a controlled bean-plant experiment to investigate ideal conditions for growth. Students synthesize bean-plant information into a newsletter that describes the project, their group bean plan, and facts about beans.

Curriculum-Framing Questions  Essential Question Are all living things related ?  Unit Questions How do living things grow in different ways?  How can I manipulate technology to document a life cycle?  How do they compare to one another?  Content Questions  What is a life cycle of a butterfly?  What is the life cycle of a frog?  What is the life cycle of a dragonfly?  How do sea turtles grow and change?  What can be used to measure the life cycle?  How much time does a life cycle take?

Bean Race Project This project will help my students develop 21 st century skills by: Collaborating with peers. Analyzing data about lifecycles and being able to present them to a selected audience. Communicating with others in a newsletter.

Gauging Student Needs Assessment Purpose of the Assessment To gather information about what students already know and what they wonder about growing plants. What I want to learn from my students? I want to find out what they already know about the Unit Questions and what they know about setting up experiments. How I have tried to promote higher-order thinking? I ask students to find relationships and draw conclusions about growing plants. How the assessment information helps me and my students plan for upcoming activities in the unit? If students have misconceptions about how to set up experiments, I can provide scaffolds. If students have different levels of understanding about the importance of plants, I can provide various resources. We will revisit this assessment throughout the unit for students to add their knowledge. What feedback or additional ideas I’d like? I would like help on my assessment. I think I need to elicit more higher- order thinking, but I’m not sure how.

 Find ways to get my students more interested in learning science  Learn about different kinds of technology my students and I can use My Goals for the Course

Goals for My Students  Work together to create a presentation appropriate for a selected audience.  Gather, analyze, organize, reflect, and process information about a specific life cycle.  Compare data about selected life cycles with other students, through graphic organizers, charts or other visual aids.  Make connections between themselves, and the lifecycles of other organisms in our world.

Request for Feedback  Places I could find a classroom in a different climate for my students to work with  Ideas for helping students take more responsibility for their own learning