Essential Question
How do people use transportation to live, work, and play?
Week 1 Day 1 - Seed 1
Week 1 Day 2 - Seed 2
Week 1 Day 3 - Seed 3
Week 1 Day 4-5 - Plan 1
Week 2 Day 1-2 - Seed 4
Week 2 Day 3 - Seed 5
Week 2 Day 4 - Seed 6
Week 2 Day 5 - Seed 7
Week 3 Day 1 - Seed 8
Week 3 Day 2-3 - Plan 2
Week 3 Day 4-5 - Plan 3
Week 4 Day 1 - Seed 9
Week 4 Day 2 - Seed 10
Week 4 Day 3 - Seed 11
Week 4 Day 4-5 - Seed 12
Download Seeds, Plans, and Resources (zip)
Unit Overview
CCSS Standards for this Unit
Monitoring Templates
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Lesson seeds are ideas that can be used to build a lesson aligned to the CCSS. Lesson seeds are not meant to be all-inclusive, nor are they substitutes for instruction. When developing lessons from these seeds, teachers must consider the needs of all learners. It is also important to build checkpoints into the lessons where appropriate formative assessment will inform a teachers instructional pacing and delivery.
This is a trans disciplinary unit that integrates most supporting Grade K Literature and Informational Text Standards, as well as, Vocabulary Acquisition and Use Standards. Students work towards mastery of multiple Social Studies standards in the areas of Economics (Standard 4), Geography (Standard 3) and Social Studies Skills and Processes. Additionally, students will engage in STEM practices to explore how people use vehicles to live, work, and play. In the area of Economics students will learn how people make choices related to good and services, how technology affects living, working, and playing, and how goods are acquired. In Geography, students will explore maps and globes to locate places and describe how transportation and communication link people and places. Students will utilize reading standards, understand, interpret, synthesize, and express social studies knowledge in Social Studies Skills and Processes.
The unit is divided into different modes of transportation: bicycle, train, boat, and plane, moving students from self to less familiar modes of transportation. In this unit students will explore different ways individuals use transportation to live, work, and play. Students build an understanding and evaluate the effectiveness of how different modes of transportation depending on the purpose and intent. Students will synthesize information learned through literary and informational texts/media to design a specific type of boat. The unit will culminate with students developing a travel plan using a mode of transport to present to an agreed upon audience. Lessons build with the expectation that students will learn reading, writing, and social studies concepts through whole group read alouds, close readings, and multiple exposures to a text and/or multiple exposures to a concept through various texts. The Paperboy by Dav Pilkey, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by D.B. Johnson, Boat Book by Gail Gibbons, and The Toy Boat by Randall de Seve, serve as anchor texts, as well as other seed lessons, to teach not only the language standards but many reading, writing, and speaking and listening standards.
These lessons and seeds can be adjusted to meet the needs and interests of individual students. The sequence of lessons and seeds, as well as the lesson design, were developed with gradual release of responsibility with an emphasis on collaborative student groups. Utilizing a multi-sensory and multi-media approach incorporates multiple components of UDL.
This unit was written with the intention of using it towards the latter part of Kindergarten. If using this unit if the first part of Kindergarten, consider adding Foundational Skills and Conventions of Standard English (CCSS) to support beginning learners needs.
Consider the need for Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) and/or for captioned/described video when selecting texts, novels, video and/or other media for this unit. See “Sources for Accessible Media” for suggestions at here.
Video: People Gotta Move on Discovery Education Click to Watch
This is the Way We Go to School by Edith Baer The World’s Fastest Machine by Marcie Aboff Hide and Seek: Things That Go by DK Publishing Bicycle Safety by Lisa Herrington The Paperboy by Dav Pilkey Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by D.B. Johnson Clickety Clack by Rob and Amy Spence The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper Freight Trains by Darlene R. Stille Little Bear’s Little Boat by Eve Bunting Boat Book by Gail Gibbons Toy Boat by Randall de Seve Flying by Donald Crews Planes by Anne Rockwell Website: America on the Move Click to Watch
