Cats – A Science and Critical Thinking Unit

Here it is, my latest product.

This is a Life Science Unit which incorporates the concepts behind the Knowledge Framework.  It’s an excellent way to build vocabulary and work on critical thinking skills.

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This is a Science unit about cats which is designed to buildCritical Thinking skills for all learners, and to work on increasing languageand vocabulary, especially with ELL learners.This unit involves minimal prep and tons of blackline masters.  In this unit there are tons of cut and paste activities, sorting and classifying activities, tallies, full color and black and white versions for the teachers, mini books, tons of images of cats and resources for the teacher.

The unit is built on the principles of Mohan’s KnowledgeFramework which is divided into six areas:

. DESCRIPTION – In order to fully understandwhat you are studying the students need to know all the proper vocabulary todescribe their thinking.  This set of lessonsis designed to assess the students’ knowledge and ensure that they have theessential vocabulary to learn about the topic.

SEQUENCE – When learning about sequence, the studentsare building their knowledge about the logical order of things.  They are also building on the vocabulary involvedlike the words “first, then, next after, last…”  Being able to organize information into alogical sequence is a higher level thinkingskill.

CHOICE – Making a choice, or a decision is avery difficult skill for some people.Working on

this skill is an importantstep in critical thinking development. 

CLASSIFICATION – Being able to sort and classifyobjects into categories is an important critical thinking skill. 

PRINCIPLES – Principles are a series of steps createdto achieve a goal.  In this lesson thestudents can follow the steps to create a drawing of a cat.  Being able to follow directions in a setorder is an important higher-level thinking skill.

EVALUATION – this is a skill for the students,not for the teacher.  This type of lessoncould be used for the teacher’s assessment, but it is initially for building upthe skill of evaluating for the child.Evaluation is when the students take all the skills and knowledge thatthey have learned and put it all together.This is how they synthesize their knowledge.

So that’s it.

I hope you enjoy it.  I can’t wait to try it out now that I’ve “prettied it up”.

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