After given time to design "I Matter Because..." cards for our self-selected research species - the cross-curricular component of the science classroom's final project - and add them to the border of the English classroom's "We Are Not Just Any Expendable Students!" bulletin board, we created a T-chart to map out how the unit theme - the effect of interconnectedness - appears in all four of the primary texts. Then we discussed the English classroom's final project: a thematic essay.
Cross-Curricular Component of Science Final Project: "I am Not Just Any Expendable Species!" Bulletin Board Border To fulfill the third, cross-curricular component of their science final projects, we received approximately ten (10) minutes at the start of class to design "I Matter Because..." cards for our self-selected endangered species. We modeled our designs and one-sentence summaries on the two - a honeybee and an elephant - we previously created for the science classroom's two keystone species case studies. Everyone added theirs to the "We Are Not Just Any Expendable Students!" bulletin board border. |
Effect of Interconnectedness T-Chart: Essay Prep People Help People v. People Hurt People In the four main texts of this English section - two short stories and two poems - we've seen characters hurt and helped by their relationships with other characters. However, as a subcategory of human interconnectedness, we've also seen how humanity's interconnectedness with nature is negative and positive in several of the texts (i.e. Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" and Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"). On a T-chart, we mapped these two general effects of interconnectedness - which cast our state of interconnectedness (with nature and with one another) as either good or bad. Through the T-Chart, we were better able to see which texts dominated which category (and how they pair with others that also dominated that category and how they contradict others in the opposite column) and how a single text held evidence for both sides of our thematic question: is our interconnectedness with one another and our natural world positive or negative? Follow this specific format - Name of Text: Brief Character Relationship Description. Using colored pencils, color-code each text title (for easier readability later on). |
English Final Project: Thematic Essay We discussed the requirements of your final English project, which will be due on Day 21, a week after the unit has officially ended. It is an out-of-class thematic essay on the effect of our interconnectedness with both each other and the natural world. Because we are interconnected, we have an impact on one another. However, that impact manifests itself in two ways: we can hurt each other or help each other. In the thematic essay (there is no page length requirement, but please review your work if it accumulates to anything less than four), you must use three of the four primary texts to discuss whether our interconnectedness is positive or negative, grounding their discussion of the texts in the literary elements discussed over the course of the unit. |