Brief Overview of Project:

In the classroom, teachers see that many students excel in some subject
areas, while they struggle to be successful in others. Our goal was to play on this
idea. We designed lessons that taught the 9th grade standards of ELA, Social
Studies and Science using a common topic in order for students to make
connections, excel in areas they sometimes struggled, give educators the
opportunity to dive deeper into a topic and to show students that reading and
writing are present in all subject areas not just ELA.
Our ICP will evaluate students learning through the use of a science research
project, which students will be able to create as a result of their learning across the
three disciplines. Students will be working to prove the question of: Is Onondaga
Lake a polluted lake? During the first ELA activity, they will learn that what they are
doing in their everyday life has an impact on the earth, specifically pollution. They
will also learn what we as humans have been doing over the years to harm the
earth and increase pollution factors. This will serve as background information when
the students are learning more specifically about the pollution of Onondaga Lake
during their social studies instruction. During this time, students will specifically
learn about how humans have impacted the pollution of Onondaga Lake. They will
collaborate with other peers electronically to share historical information, where
their goal is to explain how Onondaga Lake became the most polluted lake in the
United States. They will need to investigate if it was truly due to the impact of
humans, which was a concept they learned in their prior ELA lessons. To conclude a
day of learning, students will go to science in which they will be testing water
samples from Onondaga Lake. They will compare these lake samples to lake
samples of a clean water source. This investigation will allow students to

conceptualize how polluted Onondaga Lake actually is, as well as, justify the
relevance of their learning in ELA and Social Studies.
In the second round of activities, students will engage in another round of
lessons across each discipline. These lessons will play on the idea of students being
proactive and taking charge of the pollution problem they uncovered in the previous
lessons. Students will begin this learning journey by uncovering what humans have
already done to improve lake/water pollution. They will do this by learning about
the key facts from the Environmental Protection Act (EAP)s Clean Water Act of
1972 during Social studies instruction. Now that student have a well-rounded
education of the pollution of Lake Onondaga and the impact in which humans have
had on pollute it. They will now work in ELA to draft a letter to the region seven:
DEC, in which they will present their findings, provide information in a way that
shows their evidence based concerns, and close with the question of how they can
help with the clean-up and/or education efforts.
As a concluding activity, students will participate in two activities. They will
watch the Cowspiracy documentary, as well as, write the conclusion to their science
research project. The Cowspiracy video is a resource that contradicts the pollution
efforts they learned about in their first ELA lesson. They will learn that recycling,
saving water and driving an eco-friendly car is not all they need to be doing to stop
the destruction of our earth. They will learn that farms are also major contributors to
our pollution problems, in which the only way to stop this pollution is to change their
diet. Students will then take all the information they learned over the course of this
unit and write the conclusion to their research plan. They will be answering the
question of whether or not lake Onondaga Lake is polluted. Students will be guided
to write this conclusion using the Scientific method framework (State a problem: Is

Onondaga lake polluted?, gather resource: Social studies lessons , form a

hypothesis: students make an educated guess after gather research in their first
S.S. lesson, evaluate/conduct an experiment: Water test in Science, get results:
results of all their research across the three disciplines and draw conclusions:
students will write this in ELA to the DEC) By completing these two activities
students learning will be synthesized and they will see the relevance of their
learning across all three disciplines.
Additionally, this research project will help our students become lifelong
readers, in that, they will learn that research is forever changing and there is a
constant battle to keep up with the new research. Students will grasp this idea, by
seeing that the research and information they learned about pollution during their
first ELA lesson, were in a sense discredited by the showing of Cowspiracy. It also
shows them that there are multiple different viewpoints to similar topics. Therefore,
they will understand that a person is not fully educated on a topic unless they have
exhausted the list of perspectives that exist on the given topic.