Students will learn about the source of dairy products and how butter is made. This fun activity will have them curious about dairy cows and start the scientific inquiry process.

8th grade student will apply Newton’s Laws to design, test and evaluate materials to create the most protective helmet for an activity of their choice. Students will use force sensors and Vernier software to analyze the force reduction for their helmets. The culmination of this project is for students to write and present a sales pitch to promote their helmet to their peers at an annual "conference."

This is a whole language lesson for Speech Language Pathologists that incorporates food vocabulary, basic concepts of matching, color, and number, as well as the pragmatic skill of turn taking for language-delayed kindergarten students.

Differentiate between buying, renting, and leasing.

Teacher Guide included.

3-5 hours

This lesson is sure to sizzle, not fizzle, as students use comic strips to find onomatopoetic words, develop a vocabulary list from the words, and discuss why writers use onomatopoeia.

In this lesson, students learn that navigational techniques change when people travel to different places land, sea, air and in space. For example, an explorer traveling by land uses different methods of navigation than a sailor or an astronaut.

Description: Students will learn and exercise knowledge of the uses of by-products of common Midwestern crops.

In this lesson, students will explore how visual arts can be a tool to advance social justice and cultural change. Students will use a critical media literacy framework to closely examine the 1956 Gordon Parks Life magazine photo essay, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” and explore other unpublished photographs Parks took during
this assignment. Students will then explore how current artists such as Devin Allen continue to be inspired by Parks’ work to illuminate injustices through the visual image. Students will see the power of visual art to break down barriers of understanding, bring individuals closer to injustices occurring in their communities, and solidify the historical record for future generations.

Our approach to civic education is about providing opportunities for students to experience their democracy first-hand rather than by reading about it in a textbook. By reaching students throughout their school career, during and between election periods, we hope to prepare them to be responsible and informed citizens.

CIVIX programming focuses on the themes of elections, government budgets, elected representatives and digital media literacy. Programs available include:

(1) Student Vote - an election enables teachers to bring democracy alive in the classroom

(2) Student Budget Consultation - combines civic education and financial literacy

(3) Rep Day - connects students with their elected representatives for a virtual or in-person meeting

(4) CTRL-F - a module providing quick strategies students can use to investigate and evaluate information

(5) PoliTalks - supports educators in bringing political discussions to the classroom - Materials are free with
registration, and programming is designed for grades 5-12

(6) Democracy Bootcamp - professional development conference for teachers designed to improve their
democratic engagement and delivery of CIVIX programming

"Renforcer la démocratie grâce à l’éducation civique
CIVIX mise sur les événements politiques actuels afin de les transformer en expériences d’apprentissage authentiques et de faire vivre la démocratie dans les salles de classe."

"Tout a commencé en 2003, avec un petit groupe de jeunes personnes dévouées mettant sur pied le premier programme Vote étudiant à l'occasion des élections provinciales ontariennes. Nous avons depuis élargi notre champ d’action et nous proposons maintenant une panoplie d'activités ayant pour but de développer l’engagement démocratique chez les jeunes, pendant et entre les périodes électorales, tant au Canada qu’à l'étranger."

**Pour certaines activités, il faut créer un compte.

In this lesson, students go further into the collection and interpretation of data, including cleaning and visualizing data. Students first look at the how presenting data in different ways can help people to understand it better, and they then create visualizations of their own data. Using a the results of a preferred pizza topping survey, students must decide what to do with data that does not easily fit into the visualization scheme that they have chosen. Finally, students look at which parts of this process can be automated by a computer and which need a human to make decisions.

In this lesson students get practice making decisions with data based on some problems designed to be familiar to middle school students. Students work in groups discussing how they would use the data presented to make a decision before the class discusses their final choices. Not all questions have right answers and in some cases students can and should decide that they should collect more data. The lesson concludes with a discussion of how different people could draw different conclusions from the same data, or how collecting different data might have affected the decisions they made.

Students begin the lesson by looking at a cake preference survey that allows respondents to specify both a cake and an icing flavor. They discuss how knowing the relationship between cake and icing preference helps them better decide which combination to recommend. They are then introduced to cross tabulation, which allows them to graph relationships to different preferences. They use this technique to find relationships in a preference survey, then brainstorm the different types of problems that this process could help solve.

In this lesson students look at a simple example of how a computer could be used to complete the decision making step of the data problem solving process. Students are given the task of creating an algorithm that could suggest a vacation spot. Students then create rules, or an algorithm, that a computer could use to make this decision automatically. Students share their rules and what choices their rules would make with the class data. They then use their rules on data from their classmates to test whether their rules would make the same decision that a person would. The lesson concludes with a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of using computers to automate the data problem solving process.

To conclude this unit, students design a recommendation engine based on data that they collect and analyze from their classmates. After looking at an example of a recommendation app, students follow a project guide to complete this multi-day activity. In the first several steps, students choose what choice they want to help the user to make, what data they need to give the recommendation, create a survey, and collect information about their classmates' choices. They then interpret the data and use what they have learned to create the recommendation algorithm. Last, they use their algorithms to make recommendations to a few classmates. Students perform a peer review and make any necessary updates to their projects before preparing a presentation to the class.

In this lesson, students look at how data is collected and used by organizations to solve problems in the real world. The lesson begins with a quick review of the data problem solving process they explored in the last lesson. Then students are presented three scenarios that could be solved using data and brainstorm the types of data they would want to solve them and how they could collect the data. Each problem is designed to reflect a real-world service that exists. After brainstorming, students watch a video about a real-world service and record notes about what data is collected by the real-world service and how it is used. At the end of the lesson, students record whether data was provided actively by a user, was recorded passively, or is collected by sensors.

In the first lesson of the data unit, students get an overview of what data is and how it is used to solve problems. Students start off with a brief discussion to come to a common understanding of data. They then split into groups and use a data set to make a series of meal recommendations for people with various criteria. Each group has the choices of meal represented in a different way (pictures, recipes, menu, nutrition) that gives an advantage for one of the recommendations. Afterwards, groups compare their responses and discuss how the different representations of the meal data affected how the students were able to solve the different problems.

In this lesson students create their own system for representing information. They begin by brainstorming all the different systems they already use to represent yes-no responses. They then work in small groups to create a system that can represent any letter in the alphabet using only a single stack of cards. The cards used have one of 6 different possible drawings (6 animals, 6 colors, etc.) and so to represent the entire alphabet students will need to use patterns of multiple cards to represent each letter. Students create messages with their systems and exchange with other groups to ensure the system worked as intended. In the wrap-up discussion the class reviews any pros and cons of the different systems. They discuss commonalities between working systems and recognize that there are many possible solutions to this problem and what's important is that everyone use the same arbitrary system to communicate.