What the curriculum does well…

• The mini-unit focuses on a phenomenon likely to be familiar to young children – a puddle appearing, and later disappearing, on the ground. Their real-world experience with puddles and associated weather gives them rich tools for reasoning!
• Students have opportunities to model, share, and work with their own and their peers’ ideas throughout. Their hypotheses and questions can often be taken up during the mini-unit.
• Students are invited to represent ideas in multiple ways, including through movement.
• There are opportunities to make connections to the importance of water for organisms and ecosystems on our planet.

What needs to be done to be justice-focused… 

• Puddles as a phenomenon offer rich opportunities for localization – the focal puddle could be one in a schoolyard or a local park, with direct implications for students (like not being able to play outside at recess). 
• Water is a resource that we need to conserve and protect. Some Indigenous communities see water as living, in part due to its deeply interconnected flow and central role in supporting ecosystems and other living organisms. Puddles are part of this broader story, and the unit could be explicitly broadened to consider why polluted water is problematic and different ways of promoting water health.
• Further, water is not equally available to all communities. Students can learn about how communities are fighting for equal rights to water, and how water has rights in places such as the Global South.

These critiques are starting places. Adapt tools and resources within this unit and add or change activities based on ideas your students bring up in class, and critique our critiques!

Science & Children article (Haverly et al., 2021): Read more about how teachers used this mini-unit to engage emergent bilingual students in meaningful sense-making.

Coming soon! Our teacher learning modules utilizing this unit!

Science & Children article (Haverly et al., 2021): Read more about how teachers used this mini-unit to engage emergent bilingual students in meaningful sense-making.

NGSS Connections:
● K-PS3-1: Make observations to determine the effect of sunlight on Earth’s surface.
● K-ESS2-1: Use and share observations of local weather conditions to describe patterns over time.
● 1-ESS1-1: Use observations of the sun, moon, and stars to describe patterns that can be predicted.
● 2-PS1-2: Analyze data obtained from testing different materials to determine which materials have the properties that are best suited for an intended purpose.
● 2-PS1-3: Make observations to construct an evidence-based account of how an object made of a small set of pieces can be disassembled and made into a new object.
● 2-PS1-4: Construct an argument with evidence that some changes caused by heating or cooling can be reversed and some cannot.
● 2-ESS2-2: Develop a model to represent the shapes and kinds of land and bodies of water in an area.