Archive for the ‘4th Grade’ Category

Video Games and Violence

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

DSC01106Grade: 3rd-4th grade unit
Topics: Violence, popular culture
Social Justice Skills: Critical thinking
Created by Christine Tipton

Students determined a topic of interest, violence in video games. We explored the topic, graphing our classes video game data, reading non-fiction texts about the good and bad effects of video games, and finally speaking to an expert from the gaming industry. The unit was driven by student choice and student created questions. Students also decided on a final action step and learned to critically analyze the video games they play.

Visit this blog: http://franklinbrainblasters.blogspot.com/

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4th Graders Investigate Food Waste

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

milkwaste

Grade: 4th grade unit
Topics: Food Waste, Resources
Social Justice Skills: Critical thinking, analysis, investigation into  community issue
Teacher: Kristin Goldsworthy

Students began to investigate food waste within their own classrooms, specifically breakfast.  After investigating students noticed that the real food that was being thrown away (based on their data collection each morning for two months) was milk.  Students then learned about the benefits of milk for teens and created an ad campaign to promote students within their school to start drinking milk instead of wasting it.

Visit this blog: http://4thgradesocialactionnewark.blogspot.com/?zx=ff69afafb81ff7c1

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Student Empowerment: Making Good Choices

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

social_action_project

Grade: 3rd and 4th gade self-contained autism class
Topics: bullying, personal empowerment, differentiating/identifying good and bad choices
Social Justice Skills: Peer Education, identifying choices
Teacher: Sarah Davie

In my social action project, I use literacy to help my students with autism identify the actions of what a bully does. We conclude that a bully makes bad choices, which include hitting, punching, and taking other people’s food. After identifying bad choices, we provided alternative choices the bully could have made instead that were seen as good choices. In working with a general ed classroom, I was also able to read all of the students the story and get the peers’ feedback about bullies as well. We incorporated the peers using role play and recreating/rewriting their own versions of the book used for the unit.

Visit this blog: https://sites.google.com/site/makingachangesap2012/

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Making Our Community Better

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

DSCF6532Grade: 4th grade unit
Topics: Bullying, Violence, Civil Rights
Social Justice Skills: Creating signs, Producing PSAs, Letter Writing
Teacher: Jim Fabros

During the Winter of 2011-2012, the 4th grade students of Room 113 at Abington Avenue School participated in a community walk in which they visited their favorite community restaurants and stores. This began their journey to investigate their community. This blog is dedicated to chronicle the activities and experiences of the students as they attempt to make their neighborhood a better place to live.

Ultimately, they decided that the most prevalent challenge to their direct community was violence, specifically bullying. After weeks of investigating and learning, the students produced signs and commercials meant to help raise awareness and motivate others to stop bullying. We hope to also be a part of creating a school wide conflict resolution group. Visit the link to view more details and process of our project.

Visit this blog: http://socialjusticeabington.blogspot.com/?zx=194741faefdce86e

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Amanda’s Tale of Two Cities

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Grade: 3rd- 6thJen JPEG19
Topics: Moving, diversity, critical consciousness, white privilege
Created by Jennifer Spitz, Alumni- NYU Undergraduate Teacher Education Program

Written by Jennifer Spitz, Amanda’s Tale of Two Cities is a children’s story meant to help children come to terms with their developing sense of themselves in the world.  This story is particularly helpful to read with children of more privileged backgrounds, particularly White children who have little exposure to diversity, to support them in developing empathy, solidarity and critical awareness.

Find out more: http://amandastale.wordpress.com/

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Beat it! Defeat it! Racist Cookies, We Won’t Eat it!

Monday, June 1st, 2009

img_2850Grade: 2nd-5th
Topics: Current and historical racism, current events, civil rights
Social Justice Skills: protests, letter writing, questioning
Created by Undergraduate Childhood Teacher Education Program at NYU

This unit was created in response to a NYC bakery that sold racist cookies. The lessons links this incident to historical racism using children’s literature, teach about antiracism and provide opportunities
for social action.

Find out more: bree-beatitdefeatit.blogspot.com

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