In this unit, second graders learn about insects and the impact insects have on the natural world. Building on what students learned in Unit 1 about habitats, they will explore how different insects rely on the environment, or habitat in which they live, for survival. Through this exploration, students will learn the unique characteristics of insects, how insects can be both beneficial and destructive, and the stages of an insect’s life cycle. By the end of the unit, students will have a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the beauty of the insect world.

This unit is comprised of predominantly shared reading experiences to help students practice different reading strategies and skills. Building on unit one, students will continue to be inquisitive, active consumers of texts by asking and answering questions, and they will continue to deepen their understanding of the role text features and illustrations play in helping a reader better understand the content of a text. Students will also begin to explore the connections between scientific ideas and concepts using cause-and-effect language and will continue to strengthen their habits of discussion as they debate and analyze key ideas of the unit.

Students use their communication and writing skills as they interview a partner, write an article about them, and create a multimodal presentation to introduce their partner to the class.

Inspired by their curiosity about animals, students work together to research an animal of their choice and present the information they gather to an authentic audience.

Students increase their media literacy skills by critically examining and revising junk mail.

Students explore a variety of resources as they learn about the Holocaust. Working collaboratively, they investigate the materials, prepare oral responses, and produce a topic-based newspaper to complete their research.

Students explore the theme of conflict in literature. They learn the difference between internal and external conflict and various types of conflicts, including self against self, self against other, and self against nature or machine. Stories are used to discuss methods of managing and resolving conflict and interpersonal friction. Note: The literacy activities for the Mechanics unit are based on physical themes that have broad application to our experience in the world — concepts of rhythm, balance, spin, gravity, levity, inertia, momentum, friction, stress and tension.

Students express themselves verbally, visually, and musically by creating multimodal autobiographies, exchanging ideas with other students and sharing important events in their lives through PowerPoint presentations.

Start the presses! Catchy titles, eye-popping graphics, and attractive fonts are all on students agendas in this lesson as they create magazine covers to summarize a topic.

Like Junie B. Jones, students will be saying "Wait till you hear this" after listening to a Junie B. story and creating mystery boxes to help retell the story.

This tool allows students to create an online K-W-L chart. Saving capability makes it easy for them to start the chart before reading and then return to it to reflect on what they learned.

Students work in small groups to examine Margaret Atwood's use of and observations about language in The Handmaid's Tale. Through this activity, students discover and articulate overarching thematic trends in the book and then can extend their observations about official or political language to examples from their own world.

This lesson asks students to analyze the features of a poet's work then create their own poems based on the original model.

In this lesson, students use blogs to hold discussions about the effect of the factors of culture, history, and environment on Latino poetry.

This lesson introduces Family Message Journals - a teacher-tested tool for encouraging family involvement and supporting writing to reflect and to learn.

Students examine leads in existing texts and create alternative leads for them before revising leads in their own writing.

Meg set out to climb up and investigate the rain forest tree canopies — and to be the first scientist to do so. But she encountered challenge after challenge. Male teachers would not let her into their classrooms, the high canopy was difficult to get to, and worst of all, people were logging and clearing the forests. Meg never gave up or gave in. She studied, invented, and persevered, not only creating a future for herself as a scientist, but making sure that the rainforests had a future as well. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Your community has many different areas to explore - it might be a park, a grocery store, a forest, or an alley. For some people, it might be difficult to explore these areas because they may have differing abilities. Select one area in your community, and come up with a plan to build a way for it to be more accessible to everyone.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Using text from Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type as shared readings, first-grade students learn word families and how to decode new words in a word family.

Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on texts - including websites, printed material, video, and music - to investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.

Students evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different mediums and then compare and contrast the structure of the texts they have viewed/read to consider how the texts use different structures to convey similar ideas.

Students learn about organic gardening by developing their own research questions, conducting research, gardening at their school, creating signs about their plants, and presenting their research to the class.