The goal of the Listening and Learning Strand is for students to acquire language competence through listening, specifically building a rich vocabulary, and broad knowledge in history and science by being exposed to carefully selected, sequenced, and coherent read_alouds. The 9 units (or domains) provide lessons (including images and texts), as well as instructional objectives, core vocabulary, and assessment materials. The domain topics include: Nursery Rhymes and Fables; Five Senses; Stories; Plants; Farms; Kings and Queens; Seasons and Weather; Colonial Towns; and Taking Care of the Earth.

Students discuss and compare differing versions of Little Red Riding Hood and other tales about wolves in cumulative read-aloud sessions and text set explorations.

This unit introduces students to a variety of poetic forms and elements, as they compile their own collections of poetry.

The SchoolWide Lab middle school curriculum units are anchored in phenomena, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards(NGSS) and purposefully integrate Computational Thinking (CT). To date, four units have been developed by a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder in collaboration with middle school teachers from Denver Public Schools. The teachers also piloted the units and have taken part in the revision process.

In this unit, students become active archivists, gathering photos, artifacts, and stories for a museum exhibit that highlights one decade in their school's history.

Students explore the connotations of the colors associated with the characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby."

Students will learn how our Constitution was created and what some of its key characteristics are. They will also explore key amendments to the Constitution and their application in protecting citizens' rights.

This comprehensive series of 35 short videos explains the text, history, and relevance of the United States Constitution, Bill of Rights, and additional amendments in everyday language. Each video is assignable and ends with a call-to-action question, prompting learners to further explore the topics.

This unit is designed for middle-school students in the Content Area of Visual Art focusing on Identity Politics, Voice, Critical Race Theory, Activism and Social Justice. The unit is accessible for modification and inclusion of all grade levels. Anti-Bias and Anti-Racist training interwoven with Social-Emotional Identification and Self-Care gives students skills and guidance to navigate humanity in the twenty-first century. The objective of the unit is for students to gain critical awareness of the self in the past, present, and future. Students will be able to project and assist in their vocality and aspirations for the self and the collective. Students will explore critical race theory and identity politics in relation to the self and their visual art practice. Through research and application, students will consolidate, frame, and expand their visual thinking to be full of self-determination and self-respect.1 Through critical analysis, students will activate their critical conscience and create a voice that is written, spoken, and established through visual representation. This visual art practice will give students a voice for change and act as a facilitator to sustain all paths of liberation.

This lesson takes advantage of students' interest in music and audio sharing. Students investigate multiple perspectives in the music downloading debate and develop a persuasive argument for a classroom debate.

This is a short unit for grades 3-5 about how to take notes and cite sources properly for a research project.

Students compare and analyze novels and the movies adapted from them. They design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.

Students create poetry collections with the theme of ńgetting to know each other.î They study and then write a variety of forms of poetry to include in their collections.

Students write authentic newspaper stories, including learning about various aspects of newspapers, such as writing an article, online articles, newspaper reading habits, and layout and design techniques.

Students are introduced to the world of creative engineering product design. Through six activities, teams work through the steps of the engineering design process (or loop) by completing an actual design challenge presented in six steps. The project challenge is left up to the teacher or class to determine; it might be one decided by the teacher, brainstormed with the class, or the example provided (to design a prosthetic arm that can perform a mechanical function). As students begin by defining the problem, they learn to recognize the need, identify a target population, relate to the project, and identify its requirements and constraints. Then they conduct research, brainstorm alternative solutions, evaluate possible solutions, create and test prototypes, and consider issues for manufacturing. See the Unit Schedule section for a list of example design project topics.

Using books by Ezra Jack Keats as inspiration, students explore problems and solutions through read-alouds, discussion, and an interactive bulletin board.

Students take their ideas from the classroom page to the community pavement when they participate in a service-learning project based on their multimedia presentations.

Huckleberry Finn opens with a warning from its author that misinterpreting readers will be shot. Despite the danger, readers have been approaching the novel from such diverse critical perspectives for 120 years that it is both commonly taught and frequently banned, for a variety of reasons. Studying both the novel and its critics with an emphasis on cultural context will help students develop analytical tools essential for navigating this work and other American controversies. This lesson asks students to combine internet historical research with critical reading. Then students will produce several writing assignments exploring what readers see in Huckleberry Finn and why they see it that way.