In this unit, students will become familiar with fables and trickster tales from different cultural traditions and will see how stories change when transferred orally between generations and cultures. They will learn how both types of folktales employ various animals in different ways to portray human strengths and weaknesses and to pass down wisdom from one generation to the next. Use the following lessons to introduce students to world folklore and to explore how folktales convey the perspectives of different world cultures.

In this video segment from Nature, scientists work to discover why bees are disappearing.

The disappearance of bees will have tremendous impact upon the way we live according to scientists in this segment from Nature.

Students in grade two explore the lives of actual people who make a difference in their everyday lives. They differentiate between events that happened long ago and events that happened yesterday by studying their family histories. A number of projects are completed that preserve the past, capture the present, or impact the future, including analyzing information and drawing conclusions about how and why the world has changed. The unit concludes with students creating family history time capsules that preserve the past and present for the future.

This unit plan was originally developed by the Intel® Teach program as an exemplary unit plan demonstrating some of the best attributes of teaching with technology.

So how do we apply the scientific method to psychological research? Lots of ways, but today Hank talks about case studies, naturalistic observation, surveys and interviews, and experimentation. Also, he covers different kinds of bias in experimentation and how research practices help us avoid them.

Chapters:
Introduction: Intuition & Hindsight Bias
The Scientific Method
Case Studies
Naturalistic Observation
Surveys and Interviews
Drawing Conclusions
Experimentation
Experiment Time!
Review

Students will determine whether the amount of air in a balloon changes the distance it will travel on a fishing line. They will collect data from multiple tests and then create a graph to visualize the variation.

Animal shelters euthanize animals when no one adopts them. According to Joyce, the narrator of this segment, 26,000 dogs a year are picked up by Albuquerque Animal Services. To help find homes for the unwanted pets, Joyce, who is also a photographer, takes pictures of the dogs and posts the pictures on the Internet. She hopes when people see the dogs on the Internet they have an added incentive to come to the shelter to take them home. In this video segment from WILD TV, learn more about Joyce and her efforts to find homes for unwanted pets in Albuquerque. For more about animal shelters, see video segment "Animal Shelter".