This grades 9-12 Engineering unit focuses on the inquiry question, “What makes for the best design?” This 18-class unit supports students’ engineering practices while developing their science reading skills. It empowers students to learn firsthand about Civil Engineering, with a focus on forces, materials, skyscrapers, and bridges. Students learn about Civil Engineering principles through hands-on lab activities and through investigations of real-world engineering failures. The unit supports NGSS Science and Engineering Practices including analyzing and interpreting data, designing solutions, and engaging in argument from evidence, and reinforces the importance of testing as part of the Engineering Design Process. The unit also makes use of the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework and classroom routines including Think-Pair-Share, questioning, and identifying key/noteworthy ideas.

This grade 8 Engineering unit focuses on the inquiry question, “What is the best balloon rocket design?” This 10-day unit helps support and develop students’ skills in the science investigation and engineering and design practices. The unit supports NGSS Science and Engineering Practices including using the engineering design cycle to build, test, evaluate, and improve designs using criteria and data and scientific principles to explain the phenomenon. The unit makes use of the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework and classroom routines including setting purposes for scientific readings, Thinking Aloud, partner sharing, Talking to the Text, questioning, and identifying key/noteworthy ideas. The unit offers Interactive Notebooks and Claim-Evidence-Reasoning notetakers to support student learning.

This grade 6 Physical Science unit focuses on the inquiry question, What is the chemistry of a candle? This 9-lesson unit supports asking questions and defining problems, as well as using mathematical and computational thinking, while developing students’ science reading skills in the pursuit of introducing chemical reactions and equations. The unit is ideal for the beginning of the school year to help students begin their fluency in chemistry as well as nurture their identities as chemists or scientists. Beginning with a familiar, yet complex phenomenon, the unit walks students through analyzing evidence from observations, scientific documents, and chemical equations to help them make sense of things like a chemist. The unit makes use of the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework and classroom routines including Think-Pair-Share, Talking to the Text (annotating) for making connections and predicting, as well as using Sentence Frames (stems).

This grade 6 Physical Science unit focuses on the inquiry question, “How are Ice Spikes Formed?” Students will begin with a science occurrence found in nature that is relevant to their world. Students will see culturally relevant material and read about an African American Scientist. This five-day unit supports the NGSS Science and Engineering practice of Developing and Using Models. Students will end the unit with creating an argument based on their previous work to help explain the inquiry question. This unit draws on the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework and classroom routines including the Reading Identity Form, Think Aloud Checklist, Annotating text, and social Scaffolds.

This module supports students to learn about the Little Rock 9 and their historical context by inquiring into a rich array of primary and secondary sources and creating an argument that answers the questions, “What legal, political, and social obstacles existed in trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School? How effective were the tactics that were used to overcome those obstacles?” The interactive notebook integrates texts, tasks, scaffolds, and routines.

This module supports students to learn about the Little Rock 9 and their historical context by inquiring into photographs and other primary and secondary sources and reflecting on their own experiences with segregation and discrimination. The central questions for the module are “What obstacles existed for those trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School and how effective were their tactics to overcome those obstacles?” An interactive notebook that integrates texts, tasks, scaffolds, and routines supports students to make inferences and provide textual evidence for those inferences.