Whose Land is it Anyway? Who has the rights to make decisions about the land?

Over the course of 6 weeks, the students will engage with a variety of multi-modal primary sources (texts, discourses, community experts) that will offer multiple viewpoints of land ownership and decision making. Through engagement with these sources, students will work to advance their digital literacy and expression. They will explore music and literary composition through experiential learning and creating their own work. Students will be given opportunities to interact with peers, teachers, and experts in the community to garner a deeper understanding of the issues at hand. They will engage in critical thinking as they have to parse through various points of view to come to their own conclusion. The unit will culminate in short digital composition, created by the students, that shares their perspective on the topic. The students’ medium of expression is music and language arts in a digital format.

For clarity, we have divided the content by subject matter for the first few weeks, but in the latter portion of the unit, the lesson plans will become interdisciplinary causing an overlap across the subjects. We recommend presenting this unit in the last third of grade 6 after the students have formed a fundamental understanding for and appreciation of elements of poetry, short stories, and editorials, as well as engaging in the topics of democracy and citizenship. An additional expectation for this unit is that the students should be musically literate at a grade 6 level. For differentiation for students for which this is not the case please see our INCLUSION page.

Using Jigsaw Activities for Understanding Perspectives on Land

For weeks two through week five, students will be divided into groups and will be working on a series of jigsaw activities. In each week, the jigsaw activity will be organized around a conceptual topic tied to land ownership (e.g. land stewardship and land use). Students will have two classes each week to analyze two of the four pre-selected texts. These pre-selected texts will be a combination of short stories, news articles, editorials, poems, songs, and visual texts. These pre-selected texts will be put through ReWordify to simplify the language for a grade 6 level. This acts as a means of differentiating the classroom content for ELLs and students with IPPs, though these aids will benefit the entire class because the simplification of language will increase the chance of the students understanding a concept. For each pre-selected text, students will be expected to share the perspective of the author and how that perspective relates to the concept being discussed that week. 

Using Socratic Dialogue to Discuss Historic and Contemporary Land Issues

In weeks three and five, the students will engage in a Socratic Dialogue activity. For each of these weeks, a historic and/or contemporary land issue will be selected for discussion. The first class will be dedicated to having the students read the accompanying texts, which will also be put through ReWordify to simplify the academic language being used within them. Once again, this is done for the benefit all students. The second class will be dedicated to having the students respectfully debate the central question outlined. They will begin by meeting in their jigsaw groups and then they will bring share their thoughts with the entire class. During these discussions, the teacher will actively listen, moderate, and provide students with engaging questions that challenge their positions on the question.

Visit website