2012-2013 pacing guide（2012 - 2013 pacing guide）.doc

2012-2013 8th Grade Science Pacing Guide Braggs Public Schools How to use this pacing guide: This is intended to be a guide for pacing instruction and a tool to assist teachers in combining standards in meaningful ways to help their students master them. The length recommended for each unit is based on prioritization of standards leading to college and career readiness. Units take a total of 32 weeks. The remaining time in the school year can be divided and devoted to buffer periods. Buffer periods allow time between units for reteaching, enriching, and extending learning. That time may also be used for pre-assessing students’ understanding of the next unit’s standards to better plan instruction. Grade level teams should allow for buffer periods between units to accommodate students’ rate of learning, and to accommodate changes to the school calendar. Vocabulary includes only those words that are essential to the unit, and should be added to by school teams based on students’ needs. In science, process standards are the processes, or “how” students learn about the content standards, which are “what” students learn. Teachers may use several processes to help students master content standards, and will reuse process standards several times in a unit. As teachers assess and find students struggle with some process standards more than others, teachers have the flexibility to use those challenging process standards more frequently. Process standards that are especially challenging or critical may also be briefly taught in isolation so that students are better able to use them to explore content standards. Unit 1 Title of Unit: Experimental Design/Measurement Number of Weeks for this Unit: 4 Process Standard(s): Process Standard 1: Observe and Measure - Observing is the first action taken by the learner to acquire new information about an object, organism, or event. Opportunities for observation are developed through the use of a variety of scientific tools. Measu