What this unit is about…
The culmination of the Explore the Salish Sea Curriculum is improving the environment for wildlife and people in your own community. Students will review the science and traditional ecological knowledge-based recommendations they have made after each scientific investigation throughout the previous units, then choose one to put into action. Their choices will depend on available resources, time, and expertise available. This is the time to reach out to experts in your community, if you have not yet. Many tribes, First Nations, city, county, state, and federal agencies, universities, and non-profit marine conservation organizations would be keen to support your efforts and may already have the infrastructure and supplies to lead the way for you. Several are shown in our web map of Estuary Experts.
Projects to date include building rain gardens on or near school grounds, helping with Olympia oyster restoration, monitoring to measure benefits of beach restoration for smelt spawning on tribal lands, removing invasive plants, and planting native shrubs and trees along salmon streams. As the final chapter in the book suggests, never be afraid that your actions are too small to matter, as you and your students join the growing team of Salish Sea Heroes!
After all your hard work and fun, share your project with SeaDoc Society and find your class featured as Salish Sea Heroes on our Junior SeaDoctors online club.
Next Generation Science Standards in this unit:
5-ESS3-1 Obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use science ideas to protect the Earth’s resources and environment.
MS-ESS3-3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
MS-LS2-5 Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Photo by Mira Lutz Castle
The Sequence
After you have registered for the curriculum, preparing the unit is as easy as 1, 2, 3!
Review the unit plan, and customize it to suit your needs
This unit plan is flexible, adaptable, and in Word format to ensure that your experience can be tailored geographically to your local watershed and community, and to your particular teaching objectives and needs. Use the plan like a map- it has directions, resources, learning targets and performance expectations, and more to guide every step of the way, but the adventure you and your students share is your own.
Review and customize the slideshow
This slideshow presents helpful background information, including links to online resources and videos. With helpful presenter notes, it also acts as a guide as you progress. As with the unit plan, you may want to customize certain slides to make them even more relevant and local. For this reason, it is in PowerPoint. Save a copy and make the change you see fit.
Review, customize, and print the accompanying student journal
This editable Word document is your students’ place to wonder, record observations, take notes, diagram, and plan and record scientific investigation or engineering processes. It is also a place to celebrate hard work with well-deserved stamps on the back page. Review and customize the journal to reflect the changes you’ve made in your unit plan and slideshow.
HOW TO PRINT
In Microsoft Word, click on the Layout menu, then the arrow to expand the Page Set Up options. Click Margins and select “Book Fold” in the drop down menu by Multiple pages. Print in landscape orientation on 8.5 x 14” (legal) paper with two staples along the center fold. Note: the font is Helvetica. Changing the font can change alignment of journal pages.
Utilize the materials below for additional student resources throughout the unit.
Additional Resources & Materials
Assessments
In this unit, students are completing their experience with the Explore the Salish Sea Curriculum. They will finish by taking a post-curriculum student survey (a pre-survey was administered before the curriculum began for both students and teachers). This is a summative assessment to track progress and growth throughout the curriculum as a whole. This is also the time that you, the teacher, take your own post-curriculum teacher survey. Whether you completed all of the units or just one or two, this summative survey will be taken at the end of your experience. Pre- and post-curriculum teacher and student surveys can also be found here.
POST-SURVEYS FOR THE EXPLORE THE SALISH SEA CURRICULUM
WONDER
Give your students a visual or sensory experience that provides a chance to wonder about their natural surroundings. In this unit, have a film fest of environmental improvement success stories will provide the wonder and inspiration for students to plan their own community project. View the list of films outlined in the online resources section of the Unit Plan and/or supply your own. If you have a hope-inspiring film about restoration success, please share and we’ll add it to the list!
essential goal
After the experience of “wonder” from the video above, and instead of an essential question as in previous units, students are ready to set an environmental improvement project goal, or an essential goal. They are guided to do so in their Salish Sea Heroes Student Journals after reading Explore the Salish Sea Chapter 8, Be a Salish Sea Hero.
Background research
Once you have established an essential goal, the information-gathering begins...or continues! The Explore the Salish Sea book is a great place to start, there are examples of past projects in the link below, and you may find many more of your own for inspiration.
Develop a Testable Question
This is when your students take that larger essential question and distill it down into specific, testable question. The most direct questions begin with, “Is, Are, Do, Does, or Will…”
put science to work
Identify variables, design a procedure, carry out an investigation, analyze data, and see where active discovery leads. Will there be answers? Solutions? More questions to test? It may even be back to the drawing board to start all over again. The scientific process is never linear (and it never ends), but there is always an adventure! The resources in The Real Process of Science website explain the whole deal, and the How Science Works interactive diagram is a tool your students can use to track their own process. Pretty slick!
communicate your findings
This is a crucial part of the scientific process! It is the part where the results of all your hard work can make a difference. This may be a difference in the choices a few citizens make each day to help the sea or a new bill on the Senate floor that changes the way our whole state helps the whales. Click on the button above to return to the Real Process of Science website’s online tool for students to build the story of their scientific process.
Photo courtesy of Ryan Stone/Unsplash
Click the button below to go to the Box folder of all the documents for this unit in one place.
Ideas for improvement? Share ideas and resources with our Education Coordinator, Mira, at mdlutz@ucdavis.edu.