This cluster includes the following access points.
Vetted resources educators can use to teach the concepts and skills in this topic.
| Name |
Description |
| Forest Ecosystem: | Students are presented with this scenario: A horrible forest fire has come through an ecosystem near you! Students will need to provide a detailed news article explaining the effect that this fire had on the food chain and how local citizens can help to restore the ecosystem. In addition to providing steps to rebuild, they must also convince readers that steps need to be taken in advance to prepare ecosystems for similar disasters. |
| Bill of Rights Billboard: | This MEA will deepen students' knowledge of the Bill of Rights through collaborative problem solving. Students are required to analyze data in order to recommend three Amendments to celebrate during a community festival. They will perform operations with fractions and mixed numbers to recommend advertising options for the festival within a budget. |
| Go Fly A Kite MEA: | Students analyze a weekly weather forecast to rank and determine which day would be best for flying a kite. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Camping Supply Innovators MEA: | Help CSI determine the best canteen model to use by applying an understanding of comparing decimals. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| A Better Understanding of “Civil Rights on a City Bus”: | This lesson consists of students reading a challenging text, "Civil Rights on a City Bus," about Rosa Parks. This text requires students to determine the claims made in the article by the author and the reasons and evidence used to support them. Students will also have a chance to use context clues to define vocabulary words within the text and answer text-dependent questions. Upon completion of the reading activities, students will write a short response that provides evidence to prove each claim made by the author. |
| Inferring Informational Text - Bridges: | Students will learn all about bridges and become "engineers" as they read, comprehend, and infer text to determine the kinds of bridges that need to be built for a variety of scenarios. |
| Human Rights and Discrimination: Analyzing how a Narrator's Point of View Influences a Story: | Students will begin to learn about discrimination by analyzing how a narrator's or speaker's point of view can influence the way events are described in a story. Students will create a KWL chart, Venn diagram, and Character web, and then write an essay, all while working collaboratively to explore this important cultural issue. |
| You Be the Judge: | This model eliciting activity teaches students a common version of the scientific method by making them the judges of a science fair. In order to judge the science fair projects they have to evaluate the importance of each step of the scientific method and assign a value to it. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Space and President Kennedy: Using Close Reading and Text Dependent Questions: | Students will have an opportunity to read a portion of President Kennedy's speech to Congress about Space Exploration. Using Text Dependent Questions, students will discuss the speech with partners as well as a class and finally write a text based expository essay. |
| Are You Ready for a Hurricane?: | This activity allows students to determine the types of items that should be in a hurricane survival kit, use a budget and calculations to determine the items to include in the kit and gain an understanding of hurricanes and the need to prepare for them. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Florida Animals and Plants Research: | This resource is a guided approach to researching for fifth graders. It assists in setting up a research framework for students to use as a guideline to completing a good research project. |
| The Beginning of A Revolution: | In this lesson students learn about the American Revolution. Students will be required to use two or more texts to summarize information some aspect of the American Revolution as well as create a timeline of important events leading up to the Revolutionary War. |
| Styrofoam Eliminators: | This Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) is written at a 5th grade level. The Styrofoam Eliminators MEA provides students with an engineering problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best alternative to using Styrofoam trays in school cafeterias.
Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Sell This Habitat!: | In this lesson, students will apply their knowledge of plant and animal adaptations to create an opinion writing piece. Students will write to convince a fictional nature show producer to film plants and animals in a habitat of the student’s choosing. Students will be assessed on elements of persuasive writing including: strong introduction/conclusion, logical sequencing, strong word choice, and supporting evidence. |
| Solar Energy QR Hunt: | This lesson allows students to read and internalize information about solar power from the article "Solar-Powered Plane" from Time For Kids (1080L Lexile Level). After reading the article independently, discussing and answering the questions in pairs, the students get to go for a hunt around the classroom with a smartphone or scanner capable device to find the answers that are in the forms of QR Codes! This lesson can be completed in one 50 minute science block. |
| I Will Survive! - An Engineering Design Challenge: | This Engineering Design Challenge is intended to help fifth grade students apply the concept of how changes in an ecosystem can affect the survival of an animal species. Some suggested background building lessons are included, but it is not intended as an initial introduction to this benchmark. |
| A "Revolutionary" Approach to Learning History: | Students will research causes leading up to the Revolutionary War and their specific effects. They will use various informational text resources to research a particular central event during this time period and place key points into a cause and effect graphic organizer. Working in small groups, they will compose a reader's theatre script depicting what they gathered in their research. They will rehearse and present their reader's theatre to their classmates. |
| Amazing Adaptations!—An Engineering Design Challenge: | This Engineering Design Challenge is intended to help fifth grade students apply the concept of how structural and behavioral adaptations contribute to the survival of an animal species. Some suggested background building lessons are included, but it is not intended as an initial introduction to this benchmark. |
| Anita Balance: Climate: | Anita Balance is a tightrope walker who is deciding to determine the location of her first big tightrope walk. Students must use their knowledge about climate to determine where the best/safest location (climate) will be to do her walk. This lesson provides opportunities for students to discuss how factors such as: precipitation, elevation and distance from the ocean affect climate. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Close Reading Exemplar: "The Making of a Scientist": | The goal of this two to three day exemplar is to give students the opportunity to use the reading and writing habits they've been practicing on a regular basis to absorb deep lessons from Richard Feynman's recollections of interactions with his father. By reading and rereading the passage closely, and focusing their reading through a series of questions and discussion about the text, students will identify how and why Feynman started to look at the world through the eyes of a scientist. When combined with writing about the passage, students will discover how much they can learn from a memoir. |
| From Text to Art: Exploring the Civil Rights Dreams of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.: | In this lesson, students will determine the main ideas in two informational texts about the work and dreams of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. The culminating activity will require students to show understanding of the information presented and the relationship between the two men's dreams by 1) selecting one of three pieces of art to best represent their civil rights dreams, and 2) writing an opinion piece explaining their choice. |
| Informational Texts: Analyzing Relationships and Points of View Across Multiple Texts: | This lesson is an instructional routine for informational text in which teachers provide guided practice and students practice mapping details from multiple texts. Mapped details are used to analyze relationships and points of view from texts on the same topic.
Culminating activity options for this lesson include having students work in teams to create detailed geographical maps or write interactive dialogue to be performed for the class using props. |
| Is My Epidermis Showing?: | Have you ever wondered why we have skin? What is the skins function for our body? In this lesson, students will identify the parts of the skin and its functions in conjunction with the integumentary system. Students will be exposed to an interactive diagram where the parts of the skin are displayed individually its functions are explained. Students will get hands-on by creating a 3-dimensional model of the skin and its parts. |
| Native American Tribes of the United States - Part I: | This two-lesson study of American History examines the different tribes and geographic regions that Native Americans inhabited in the United States. Students will learn briefly about each tribe and region during direct instruction and then, in small groups, conduct research on one tribe in depth. Part II of the lesson requires students to present their research to the class and compare their Native American tribe with one from another group presentation. |
| Survival of the Fittest: | This is a five day lesson integrating Science, Reading and Writing. It is developed on a Reading lesson plan format using Shared Reading, Core Reading, Guided Reading and centers but can easily be transferred on to a Science 5E lesson format. The versatility of the lesson and the integration between subjects lends itself to it being widely used among teachers for different reasons; whether the teacher's need be in Science, Reading or Writing the lesson provides opportunities for all areas to be addressed. Most importantly, it offers the busy teacher an opportunity to implement one lesson to cover three subjects. |
| Tone: From Understanding to Application--Using Tone to Create an Original Memoir: | In this lesson, students will analyze the artist's tone in the painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware, December 1776." Using the same techniques of looking at the details, students will analyze the tone of the primary account and secondary account in the informational text "Washington Crosses the Delaware, 1776" to gain an understanding of how authors create tone in their writing. The culminating activity will require students to demonstrate an understanding of their study of point of view, tone, and information presented in "Washington Crosses the Delaware, 1776" by writing a historically accurate first-person memoir of the event in which the tone reflects their perspective of the event. |
| Water, Water Everywhere! Research the Water Cycle: | Water, Water Everywhere! Research the Water Cycle asks students to conduct their own research on the water cycle (hydrologic cycle). Working collaboratively in small groups, students will research and write about the relationships between stages in the water cycle and the three states of matter relating to water. After completing this lesson, students will be prepared to create a model of the water cycle. |
| What It's Made Of: A Solute to Mixture or Solution: | In this lesson, students will explore samples to determine properties of components of mixtures. Over the course of the exploration, the teacher will guide the students to discover what sets a solution apart. Access points included. |
Vetted resources students can use to learn the concepts and skills in this topic.
