JUNIOR UNIT (GRADES 3-5)
The Junior Unit follows a three-year American
history rotation, spanning the periods from pre-colonial to
contemporary. Topics examined in-depth have included the Native
American Experience, Colonial Settlement, the Revolutionary
War, the Constitution, the Westward Movement, Civil War and
Reconstruction, Immigration and Industrialization, Space Exploration,
and the Civil Rights Movement.
In the Junior Unit, students are now reading to
learn and are able to use basic academic skills with increasing
confidence and precision. Improving skills allow for increasingly sophisticated
student response to thematic studies.
For the
unit
“Immigration and Industrialization," students learned
about late-19th-century immigrant experiences and about the
American coal-mining industry—specifically, the technology
of coal mining, the working conditions faced by miners, the
rise of labor unions, and coal’s role in transforming
the United States into a nation of industrial
workers. The children worked with primary and secondary sources,
read historical fiction, and visited the Baltimore Museum
of Industry and the Lackawanna Coal Mine. They demonstrated
all that they had learned by writing and performing a play about two fictional families who emigrated
from Poland to the United States in 1890. Commenting on her
role as the president of the United Mine Workers of America,
one student said, “I
felt very powerful. It felt like real life—and it was
fun.”
Writing and reading are emphasized across the
curriculum. Language arts classes are devoted to formal literature
study, writing instruction, spelling, and informal grammar study.
Science units are integrated with the thematic
studies or are closely associated with our environmental program
at Shelly Ridge. Topics in mathematics include whole-number
operations, fractions, decimals, percents, geometry, patterns
and functions, and probability.
Students attend "specials"--classes
taught by specialists in
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Sample Language
Arts Books:
Abel's Island
by William Steig
Across Five Aprils
by Irene Hunt
The Courage of Sarah Noble
by Alice Dalgliesh
Dragonwings
by Laurence Yep
Homecoming
by Cynthia Voight
The Hundred Dresses
by Eleanor Estes
Indian Captive
by Lois Lenski
Journey Home
by Yoshika Uchida
Little House in the Big Woods
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Lyddie
by Katherine Paterson
Mississippi Bridge
by Mildred D. Taylor
Nightjohn
by Gary Paulsen
Number the Stars
by Lois Lowry
Rifles for Watie
by Harold Keith
The Watsons go to Birmingham--1963
by Christopher P. Curtis
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
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