The focus for this nine weeks will be on what’s up: the weather, the sky, outer space, and everything about nature that’s “out there.”

Students will realize that there are no limits to learning and living logically.

Students will create a presentation using Google Earth to show areas impacted by a natural disaster.

Among preparations students use for TAKS Reading (Wednesday, April 28th), students will write poetry that relates to nature (and fury?) as part of a self-published book. Students will also see how astronomy fits into the life (and lifestyle) of Mark Twain. Students will read either Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (classified as fantasy and/or science fiction) or Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee (tall tale or fantasy).

Students will Texas’s impact on the world since 1900, including the role of government in establishing Texas’s predominance in world industry. The unit caps off with events beyond government’s control—i.e., weather disasters—and how Texas citizens adapt to global commercial and natural changes.

Students will appropriately represent and present relationships among collected data with line plots, line graphs, bar graphs, stem and leaf plots, circle graphs, and Venn diagrams—all with justification.

Students will study earth systems and how they impact weather patterns. They will also investigate catastrophic natural events and their impact on specific geographical locations.

Students will take the information,research, and data collected through science, Texas history, and math and use it to create a virtual tour within Google Earth. This virtual tour will be linked into the final digital portfolio for the year.