IMSA Excellence 2000+ Curriculum
Links on this page
- Overview
- Web of Life
- Patterns Around Us
- Round and Round: Circular and Spherical Relationships
- E2K+Works / EarthWorks
- Playful Connections
- Understanding Scale and Proportion: Earth's Place in the Solar System
- Seeing Math and Science in a New Light: Reflections and Symmetry
- Rock 'n Roll: Tectonics and Seismicity in Illinois and Beyond
- Your Sense-Sational Senses: Pathways to Learning
- Investigating Chaos Theory
- Let's do Launch: Learning About Force and Motion
- CSI: IMSA E2K+ Style
- Supersize or Miniaturize? Achieving More or Less
- Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Using Games of Strategy
Late Elementary (4-5) Units
Middle School (6-8) Units
Curriculum Overview
The IMSA E2K+ curriculum is integrative, problem centered and inquiry based. Mathematics and science are integrated to develop the concepts and ideas of each unit. The units have been developed to incorporate best-practice pedagogy and are extensions of the general mathematics and science concepts, skills and dispositions articulated through the Illinois Learning Standards.
The activities in each unit are hands-on/minds-on and build on previous knowledge. Teachers use appropriate questioning strategies to assess student readiness and understanding. Communication and discussion of information and ideas are a focus of each activity. Developing problem solving strategies and new ways of thinking are stressed.
Throughout their participation in IMSA Excellence 2000+, teachers and coordinators are able to work through a variety of the curriculum units and hone their teaching skills. The collaborative nature of the professional development models the integrative, problem centered, inquiry approach to be used with the IMSA E2K+ students at their school. This model allows both teachers and learners to gain insight and understanding of the curricular materials, and encourages creative thinking and the development of new ideas. Participants receive five and one-half days of professional development per year.
We currently have five curriculum units for late elementary and ten curriculum units for middle school. To learn more about a unit, click on the title below (some of these pages are under development, so please be patient)
Web of Life
The unit includes many of the scientific concepts of biology and chemistry, and also relates those concepts to the issues of sustainability. Activities in this unit are designed for students to:
- Address activities focusing on problem-solving, inquiry and experimental design
- Engage in both individual and collaborative learning.
- Participate in data collection and individual analysis of information.
- Engage in various fields of science and relate issues to their lives.
- Actively construct their own knowledge which is real and purposeful.
Patterns Around Us
This unit includes many mathematic and scientific concepts found in real world situations. Topics such as data analysis, astronomy, number sense, geometry, algebra, geology, and physical science will be explored. Through the activities, the students will:
- Experience interdisciplinary activities and a variety of teaching styles,
- Address the relationships of various patterns in the real world,
- Engage in generating patterns to determine future occurrences,
- Participate in hands on activities to explore their understanding,
- Discover patterns in various areas of math and science,
- Examine data created in the activities to find patterns,
- Understand that there is a cyclical pattern of change in the appearance of the moon when observed from earth.
Round and Round: Circular and Spherical Relationships
This unit includes many of the scientific concepts of “roundness”, circular motion and rotation. Within the activities contained in this unit, the students will:
- engage in activities to recognize and understand characteristics of circular and spherical relationships
- discover how motion of circles and spheres relate to the world around us
- apply principles of circles, spheres, and rotations to real world problems
- test the cause and effect relationships of repetitive round and round movement
- discover multiple meanings for the concept “round.”
- distinguish between the concept of round and the repetitive movement of going round and round
E2K+Works / EarthWorks
This collaborative effort between IMSA Excellence 2000+ of Aurora, IL and Experiencia located in Chicago, IL provides constructive experiences where students:
- Engage in activities to recognize and understand characteristics of prairie, lake, forest, and cave habitats
- Apply skills of pictograph, stem and leaf, glyph, bar, circle, and box and whisker graphing and depiction of various average representations.
- Apply principles of data analysis to express their understanding of evidence gathered through experimentation.
- Experience the inquiry process utilized by scientists exploring energy, water, air and land
- Discover multiple interrelationships of systems found within the environment.
- Distinguish between the creatures and careers found within the chosen habitats.
Playful Connections
Games and puzzles are an important part of our world and heritage. Games provide opportunities for students to practice skills, expand fluency, and to strengthen understanding of various concepts and encourage students through play to:
- explore how the processes of critical thinking and problem solving are used in games.
- Demonstrate skill ability, fluency, and understanding in various concepts.
- Communicate their reasoning and identify connections
- Design data collection and analyze data representation
- Create a game that reflects individual growth in skill, fluency, and understanding.
Understanding Scale and Proportion: Earth's Place in the Solar System
Activities in this unit are designed to develop and/or improve students' abilities to engage in scientific inquiry and mathematical investigations both as individuals and as productive team members. Throughout the unit the students will:
- Use direct and indirect measuring techniques to develop an awareness of the vastness of space as it relates to measures encountered in daily life.
- Develop an historical perspective of humankind's understanding of Earth's place in the Solar System.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the power of scientific notation and the relationships among gravity, weight and mass.
Seeing Math and Science in a New Light: Reflections and Symmetry
This unit helps students develop certain enduring understandings related to the phenomena of reflection and symmetry. Through the activities of the lessons in this unit the students will:
- Investigate properties of light and surfaces in order to identify underlying assumptions related to reflection.
- Formulate conclusions about the relationship between objects and their reflected images.
- Further develop the concepts of symmetry and balance as described through mathematical models.
- Apply the appropriate geometry and symmetry considerations to demonstrate their understanding of reflection.
Rock 'n Roll: Tectonics and Seismicity in Illinois and Beyond
This unit includes lessons to develop in the students enduring understandings related to the Earth's structure and changes in the lithosphere. The students will construct new knowledge and understanding as they:
- Become knowledgeable about the structure of the Earth.
- Explore evidence of changes in the earth including measures used to describe these changes.
- Collect, analyze, display and interpret large quantities of data.
Your Sense-Sational Senses: Pathways to Learning
This unit engages the students in inquiry and problem solving to explore ways that the senses provide input into the human learning process. Throughout the unit the students will:
- Gather information using sensory input.
- Use the information to pose questions, make predictions and hypotheses, and find patterns to understand and explain real world problems.
- Evaluate inferences, use appropriate statistical methods to help with data analysis and draw conclusions based on evidence.
Investigating Chaos Theory
This unit uses a wide variety of mathematics and science activities to give the students a basic overview of the relatively new concept of chaos as it applies to dynamic systems. The activities in the unit develop student understanding that:
- Chaos theory is used to understand complex, dynamic physical systems in a new way.
- Randomness can occur in apparently normal data calculations, and conversely, that patterns can be found in apparently random data.
Let's do Launch: Learning About Force and Motion
This unit has been designed and written to help students develop certain enduring understandings related to the phenomena of motion and the forces related to it. Throughout the unit the students will:
- Explore the relationships between force and motion.
- Understand the effect different variables have on the outcomes of an experiment.
- Analyze simple motions using direct and indirect variation.
- Interpret graphical representations to explain physical phenomena.
- Experiment with technological design to optimize performance.
- Gain an understanding of the context in which rocketry studies have proceeded.
CSI: IMSA E2K+ Style
This unit engages the students in inquiry and problem solving using forensic science techniques. This problem-centered unit embeds students in a crime scenario, which they are challenged to solve; in the process they must learn and apply an array of concepts that integrate mathematics and science. Communication and collaborative team work are a focus as the students work together to find out "Who Done It?" Through the activities of this unit, students will:
- Hone their observational and pattern-recognition skills by investigating fine-level details in various types of evidence.
- Learn some of the techniques of forensic science, and apply these to attain deeper understanding of concepts in physics, biology and mathematics.
- Develop skills in technology application by conducting Internet searches, using Excel spreadsheets to organize and display data and evaluating information obtained.
- Assemble disparate pieces of evidence to construct a cohesive picture, so as to gain understanding of the analogy between scientific inquiry and criminal court cases.
Supersize or Miniaturize? Achieving More or Less
This unit has been designed to help students develop enduring understandings related to relationships between sizes and shapes of geometrical objects. Students striving to derive the greatest benefits of this unit will:
- Construct models to explore geometric properties of different objects.
- Experiment with mathematical design to maximize or minimize various quantities.
- Analyze path lengths that exhibit the shortest distance between two points.
- Solve problems that require knowledge of areas and volumes.
- Examine the dependencies between shapes and sizes of geometrical objects.
- Gain an understanding of the role that constraints play in solution formation.
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Using Games of Strategy
This unit uses a variety of strategy games to develop mathematical communication, problem solving and thinking skills. Throughout this unit the students will:
- Develop their ability to make data-based decisions using their knowledge of logic and game design.
- Analyze their own thinking processes and provide reasons for the decisions they make.