My final curriculum product is a six-day unit that provides background information to the actual lab we completed during the summer. This extension begins with a video on the nitrogen cycle followed by an activity where students read about information on the Nitrogen Cycle. After reading the information students will color code a nitrogen cycle diagram. On day two, students will read a primary document written by George Washington Carver. This relates to the history mentioned in the video. Students will analyze the primary source and determine if there is any bias in Carver’s writing. On day three, students will read a National Geographic article, “Why Tiny Microbes Mean Big Things to Farming.” Students will determine the main idea as a class and the teacher will write it on the board. With group members, students will create a tree map with the title of the article at top and the headings of the article as the branches. With their group, students will find sentences in each section of the article that they feel support the central idea of the article. They will write these sentences verbatim on yellow sticky notes and stick them in the appropriate location on the tree map. Then students will determine the So what? and So why? of the article: what was it about and why is it important. This will be written on the poster. On day 4 students will fold a piece of notebook paper in half the long way and they will write their so what sentence on a pink sticky note and their so why sentence on a blue sticky note. Students will rephrase the sentences from the tree map and write them in their own words on yellow sticky notes. These sticky notes will be layered, starting with pink and ending with blue on the left side of the notebook paper. On day 5 students will copy all the words on their sticky notes, word-for-word on the right side of their folded notebook paper. The sentences will connect into a long paragraph. On day 6 students will read their paragraphs aloud with their their group members to check for grammatical or spelling errors.

I would like to see my unit implemented in the language arts/social studies classrooms that are teamed with the science teachers who implement our project. I think it would be amazing to have such a meaningful project in classrooms that do not teach science so students can make more relevant connects to multiple curriculums. Instead of teachers approaching their curriculum as a silo, we can approach it together and integrate concepts.