To begin this unit, the students will form clubs, and each club studies an animal. Teachers will teach your children to preview the collection of texts on their animal and then to each take a subtopic at a time and read across books on that subtopic, starting with an easier book so as to develop the background knowledge needed to handle more detailed and challenging texts. As one club member researches the animal’s habitat and another, the animal’s life cycle, they’ll teach them all to synthesize and organize what they are learning. Clubs then transfer what they learned into the study of a second animal. Eventually they’ll be taught to compare and contrast
across animals—the teacher and the children will be surprised to learn that yes, spiders and tigers actually are the same in some ways! The unit will end with children applying their knowledge of animals to solve realworld problems, such as creating a better habitat for
animals in zoos or investigating why certain animals are no longer thriving in their environments. This unit, then, is more than a unit on information reading. It is a unit on research. This unit has the power to change the students’ lives, not because they will learn about
dolphins or turtles, but because they will learn to learn—perhaps the single most important academic skill we can offer our students as we set them out into the world. This unit also sets the stage also for independent research projects that students tackle in fifth grade.