Learner Description - The students who will participate in this project are in multiage classes in either third or fourth grade. Ability levels range from "at risk" to high ability. This also includes children with special needs, language deficiencies, and gifted children. Students are grouped in groups of four based on work habits and learning styles.

Overview -

What will be taught? Students will learn about the different communities within Illinois and what it takes to establish and maintain a running community, The students will learn the different types of landforms, natural resources, government, climate, bodies of water, businesses/industries, and culture/customs within those communities.

How will it be taught? In the beginning of the school year, students spent time learning about communities through the adopted social studies curriculum. In this project, they are applying what they have learned about communities and incorporating it into studying the state of Illinois. Students have used many resources to retrieve the necessary information. Such resources include a class set of Illinois resource books, the Internet, Illinois maps, Social Studies textbook, and other Illinois resource books from the library. Students were asked to complete informational questions on communities and how they want to build their own as a way to organize the information that they gathered.

What will students do and learn? Each groups challenge is to begin a new community in a specific region of Illinois. The group must convince others that this is the best community in which to live. They will be trying to persuade others to move to their new town. Some of the questions the groups will be answering are: Why do you want to build your community there?, What kind of climate and landforms does your community have?, What natural resources are available in your community?, and What kind of government will you have in your community?. Each group will create a poster board display of their community layout, write a persuasive paragraph convincing others to move to their new community, and customize a page about their community for a class Illinois book.

Rationale - Purpose for the unit as a whole. The WHY questions.

Why would you teach this unit? Students will gain a better overview of Illinois and communities. Based upon the adopted Social Studies curriculum, Illinois and communities are two major subject areas within the text.

Why would this this qualify as an Engaged Learning unit? This would qualify for an Engaged Learning unit because it covers so many of the engaged learning indicators. The vision of learning indicator includes students being responsible for learning by setting goals, choosing tasks, developing assessments, and working collaboratively on developing ideas and communicating with group members to create the big picture. The tasks pertained to the real world of living in a community within Illinois and were interesting to all students, but not too difficult to become frustrating. Assessment includes students presenting their projects in order to inform the rest of the class of their community and why people should move to that specific area. While working on completing their final projects, the students will be engaged in researching different types of information that needs to be included. During the allotted times for group work, teachers were available for questions and guidance. The roles of the teacher are to be a facilitator, a guide, and a co-learner/co-investigator. The roles of the student include being an explorer, a teacher, and a producer. Students are learning to collaborate with each other and be empathetic towards other group member's needs and/or ideas. Students are arranged in a flexible grouping style. Each group has access to the Internet and other resources. During project time, teachers interact and collaborate in diverse ways. The technology used in this project is organized, engagable, easy to use, and functional. Students used the Internet to gather information and used the computer to produce a portion of their final assessment.

Why is technology an important component of this unit? Technology is an important component in this project. The students will be using different varieties of technology to enhance their Illinois community project. Such varieties include digital camera, word processing skills, and the Internet. Student volunteers who have taken an after school class in digital photography helped to take some of the digital pictures of students working throughout the stages of the Illinois project. These photos will be used to create an IMovie of the project. Students used the Internet to gather information on their county region in Illinois. This was done in the beginning stages of the project, when students were completing their graphic organizer/question sheets on the different necessities of a community. The students basically investigated the websites on their own and used search engines in which they were familiar with to gather their information. The Appleworks program was used to type their persuasive paragraph and to make their class book page. In their class book page, students had to use the tool box to insert at least three pictures. The students have demonstrated that they are very capable of searching the Internet and using the various components of Appleworks Word Processing on their own.

Why is this project authentic/meaningful , and challenging for students? This project is authentic/meaningful and challenging for the students because they have to retrieve background knowledge of communities and the state of Illinois in order to successfully build a community in which survival is possible.

Goals - Content, Cognitive and Social - The WHAT questions

What new attributes (knowledge, skills, attitudes) do you expect students to gain? Through this project, students will learn the skill of persuasive writing, building a class magazine, and a layout of their developed community.

What school, district, state and national standards/benchmarks are addressed?

Social Studies

14.B.2 Explain what government does at local, state and national levels.

15.A.2a Explain how economic systems decide what goods and services are produced, how they are produced and who consumes them.

16.A.2c Ask questions and seek answers by collecting and analyzing data from historic documents, images and other literary and non-literary sources.

17.A.2a Compare the physical characteristics of places including soils, land forms, vegetation, wildlife, climate, natural hazards.

17.A.2b Use maps and other geographic representations and instruments to gather information about people, places and environments.

17.B.2b Explain how physical and living components interact in a variety of ecosystems including desert, prairie, flood plain, forest,

17.D.2b Identify different settlement patterns in Illinois and the United States and relate them to physical features and resources.

18.A.2 Explain ways in which language, stories, folk tales, music, media and artistic creations serve as expressions of culture.

English

1.B.2a Establish purposes for reading; survey materials; ask questions; make predictions; connect, clarify and extend ideas.

1.C.2d Summarize and make generalizations from content and relate to purpose of material.

1.C.2f Connect information presented in tables, maps and charts to printed or electronic text.

3.A.2 Write paragraphs that include a variety of sentence types; appropriate use of the eight parts of speech; and accurate spelling, capitalization and punctuation.

3.B.2a Generate and organize ideas using a variety of planning strategies (e.g., mapping, outlining, drafting).

3.C.2b Produce and format compositions for specified audiences using available technology.

4.B.2a Present oral reports to an audience using correct language and nonverbal expressions for the intended purpose and message within a suggested organizational format.

4.B.2b Use speaking skills and procedures to participate in group discussions.

Science

5.A.2b Organize and integrate information from a variety of sources (e.g., books, interviews, library reference materials, web- sites, CD/ROMs).

5.C.2b Prepare and deliver oral presentations based on inquiry or research.

12.E.2a Identify and explain natural cycles of the Earth's land, water and atmospheric systems (e.g., rock cycle, water cycle, weather patterns).

Learning Activities - The activities required to achieve the goals.

The How questions.

Student Assessment- Enables student and teacher to measure student's attainment of goals.

What are my scoring characteristics? (What do I want to measure? What is an important outcome of this unit?) We want to be able to measure the knowledge attained by the students in the subject area of Illinois and communities. It is important for students to understand what it takes to build and keep a community alive. We will evaluate students by using a student and teacher created rubric. Students will be assessed on their persuasive paragraph and their poster and presentation. For the persuasive paragraph, we want to measure their ability to persuade others to move to their community. For their poster and presentation, we want to measure their knowledge of what a community consists of (landforms, natural resources, climate, shelter, food, and government) and how well they can present the information.

What will indicate that students are novices, practitioners, or experts? Students will be able to demonstrate their expertise by what they have included on their poster and how much information they have used to persuade others to move to their community.

How will I measure and communicate student progress on the goals? Student progress will be monitored throughout the project and will be measured through the final assessment presentation according to the established rubrics.

How can students be involved in establishing goals and criteria for the assessment? After reviewing various information on communities and the state of Illinois, students will be able to produce a rubric for the different types of assessments used.

How will the assessments be implemented to ensure that they are generative? Seamless and ongoing? Equitable for all students? An authentic task? All assessments are generated by the students and require continuous effort. The variety of assessments allows for equitably amongst all students.

How will students demonstrate their knowledge and skills? Teacher observations, projects, presentations, oral reports, paper-&-pencil activities, articles, student self-assessment, student peer assessment, etc.

Students will demonstrate their knowledge and skills by self assessments, teacher observations as well as assessments, creation of their projects, and sharing with the class their final projects to further develop everyone's understanding of Illinois and communities.

Management

How will you manage student work individually and in groups? - What resources will you need to do this unit? Students work will be managed in groups, as well as individually. Children in the class will have a folder to store all of their research materials and supplies. Children will have free range of the room to work on their projects in groups. They can work on the computers, at tables within the room, on the floor, and at their desks. The teachers will be circling the room to see if children need assistance or extra help. They will also make sure that each group is on task and where they need to be on their project work.

The resources used in this unit include the Internet, Illinois resource books, Illinois maps, Social Studies textbook, and other Illinois resource books from the library.

How will the room(s) be arranged. Students will be working in their groups of four within the two classrooms (Mrs. Anderson's and Ms. Helbling's room). The special education group will be working in Mrs. Chicca's room during some of their scheduled pullout times. The students are encouraged to work at desks, tables, and on the floor, whatever is suitable for the task that they are working on for that particular day.

Where will equipment and materials be located to promote maximum use? Equipment and materials are located within the classroom.

Where will students need to work and how can they be accommodated? Students are allowed to work within the designated classrooms where appropriate materials will be provided by the teacher.

How will students with special needs be helped? Students with special needs will be helped by the special education teacher. The teacher will assist in the planning stages of the project and will guide the students through making a modified rubric for the assessments. The teacher will also guide the students in what to do when working in Mrs. Anderson or Miss Helbling's room. There will be collaboration between all three teachers on what the special needs students are working on and where they are in their project.

Unit Evaluation

What will I need to do, be aware of, and/or gather while teaching the unit in order to answer these questions:

What was effective?

What wasn't effective?

What will I do differently next time?

At the end of this unit, the classes will come together to discuss what worked and what did not, what they liked about the overall projects and what they disliked. I will be taking notes down so that I, as a teacher, can improve future engaged learning projects within my classroom.