What are the major educational concepts/topics/issues that will be taught, and that all students should learn,

as part of this unit? (1-2 paragraphs)

The major concepts that will be discussed during this unit are geographical features. The students will be able to understand the different climate of a region of the world based on their location from the equator, etc. The students will also be able to work/create maps (physical, etc), and understand what the symbols represent via a map key.

Students will be taught about diversity in cultures in comparison to the United States and other countries involved in the Sochi 2014 Olympics. Students will continue the process of being taught, through teacher guided assistance and modeling, research, investigative practices, providing support for their claims, and will continue to work on their oral presentation skills through their activities related to the ELA Common Core Standards. Students will practice taking on the role of a reporter to increase their sense of identity and will produce an article related to their reporting experience to be published on an interactive web site. These age appropriate activities will assist with gaining knowledge about careers, publishing, and being able to properly present themselves to the class through oral monologue. They will be taught, through teacher modeling and a guest speaker, how to develop public speaking necessities like eye contact, prose, pronunciation, and appropriate volume of their voice, which is also aligned with the standards for this age group. The science portion of the multidisciplinary unit is focusing on engineering design skills from the NGSS while also strengthe ning students abilities to implement scientific process skills through experimentation. In keeping with the Olympics theme, teams of students will participate in the Imagine Javelins activity. Students make modifications to the classic paper airplane and design an experiment tha t will allow iterative testing and analyze data from the experiment to identify the best characteristics to use in the competition. Students are presented with a problem what modifications can be made to a paper airplane to make it fly a longer distance. By making a hypothesis, designing a repeatable experiment, analyzing the data, and drawing conclusions, students will have gained engineering skills which can be applied inside and outside the science classroom. In addition to gaining science process skills and engineering design skills, students will gain experience working in teams on a project that will have relevance in a friendly competition. Tables, Graphs, Measures of Central Tendency

One of the major educational concepts is learning how to organize data and create visual representations of information. This can be seen in math class when students create tables and graphs to represent the Olympic times of events from previous years and display the different measures of central tendency. Science focuses on this concept through their use of the scientific process during the paper airplane experimentation. Students will record their data of the different experiments in represent it in a way that they can draw conclusions from their information. Social Studies will have students creating their own maps to represent the different climates and features of different countries at the Olympic Games. This will require students to determine which features of these nations are important and how to create a visual representation of the country in a cohesive and inclusive way. In language arts, students will research information about different cultures at the Olympic Games and organize this information in a way to create a detailed report that reflects the diverse culture of their nation. Another major educational concept of the Olympic Unit is working as a group to produce a desired outcome. Students will be able to create high quality work by effectively utilizing all team members to provide their strengths to the project. This can be seen in Social Studies when students work together to create a map that fully includes all the details of climate and geography in the Olympic nation. Language Arts provides this by feedback. Although students are individually writing and giving their oral monologue, students still will require their audience to give tips and helpful feedback in order for each student to become the best speaker they can be. In math class, students will work together to complete Olympic word problems and then present them in a logical manner to the class for the rest of the students to learn. Finally, science uses teamwork as they make modifications to their paper airplanes to test what the optimal design is for the best flight for the paper airplane.