The Curriculum Overview describes the components of a project and helps you make the most
of the resources in the 3-6 Curriculum kit. Each project provides ideas for integrating
the 3-6 Curriculum kit software and Apple technologies, helping your students
make new connections and gain new insights.
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Navigators' Beacon
Students work in small groups to design lighthouses and situate them in
time and place. They create beacons of light and sound appropriate to an
historical period they choose, decide where the lighthouse should be
located, and draw up scale plans for the lighthouse's construction.
Tangled Web
Student groups use the two basic structural units of the World Wide Web,
the page and the hyperlink, to create a virtual labyrinth that other
students can explore as a challenging game. The labyrinth is constructed
of web pages, each of which contains links that both bring the player
closer to the final, hidden page, as well as divert players from this
final goal. Groups set up these pages so that determining which link is
best is a matter of figuring out a riddle, solving a problem, or finding
the answer to a question about science, language arts, math, or history.
Navigation Museum
Students imagine they're curators at a museum devoted to showcasing
improvements in humans' ability to find their way from place to place
without getting lost. Each pair of curators proposes and creates an
exhibit about a navigation tool, a kind of map, a voyaging craft, a
famous navigator, a mapmaker, or an explorer. Curators then work
together to combine their exhibits into an actual museum visited by
people from outside the classroom.
Storytelling Signposts
Students examine favorite stories from the different cultures
represented in their community. The whole class reads and compares
stories, looking for similarities. Then small groups meet to continue
discussion and to write a new version of a favorite story, set in their
community.
Architecture of a Government
Students learn about the issues faced by the Founding Fathers and
research the structure and principles of the government the delegates put together during the
Constitutional Convention. Students then take part in a class constitutional convention
in which they create a class government modeled on the architecture of
the U.S. government.
Communities Across Time
Students research their own community in the present to learn about what
makes up a community, and then investigate community life in six different time
periods of United States' history, creating multimedia electronic books to represent each
period. Taken together, the electronic books chronicle the evolution of community life
in the United States.
The Rainforest at Risk
Students prepare for and implement a dynamic Town Meeting to address a
proposal to log the tropical hardwood trees in a rainforest and then mine the mineral
wealth in the earth below. Students work in teams to role-play the various affected parties;
they then come together in the Town Meeting to discuss the issues and decide on a plan
of action.
Structure of a Natural Community
Students observe the plants and animals in research sites and record what they observe in
writing, pictures, and quantitative data. After looking at the growth and change of the
plants over a period of time, recording these changes on spreadsheets, and speculating
about the changes that may happen over longer periods of time, students publish their
ideas and information as reports and as a project Web site.
Electrons in Motion
Students explore electrical principles, apply what they learn in the
construction of virtual electric circuits, and then write and tell
stories about their circuits from the point of view of electrons
traveling in them.
Inventions That Changed Our Lives
Students celebrate the power of innovation and invention by staging an
Invention Convention. Divided into five teams representing five
different time periods, students research the significant inventions of
the time they are studying and make presentations describing the impact
of those inventions on daily life.
Migration Math Games
Students explore an interactive multimedia mystery to gain familiarity
with the construction of word problems and practice solving them.
Students then create their own word problems for others to solve, based
on the mathematical aspects of a species' seasonal migration.
Packing Up 100 Pounds
Students imagine that they're about to immigrate to another country, and
have to decide what to pack. Using a spreadsheet, each pair of travelers
creates a categorized packing list of items that will weigh no more than
100 pounds. Students then write short stories to chronicle their
travels.
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