Students investigate what it means to be human through a central text, using it alongside images, observations, discussion, and simple research to examine identity, emotions, relationships, and our dependence on the natural world. They connect the text’s ideas to their own lives, community, and surroundings through collaborative inquiry, creative expression, and reflection. Across the week, they build a stronger sense of self, belonging, and responsibility while developing evidence-based interpretations they can communicate clearly to others. The experience culminates in a public sharing of personal insights and text-based evidence through accessible, mixed-media work.

Students investigate how human identity is shaped by body systems, culture, relationships, and the natural world, using evidence from a shared text, images, observations, and personal experience. They ask meaningful questions about what humans need to live and belong, then analyze how people exist in relationship with land, water, air, animals, and weather using details gathered from reading, discussion, and inquiry. They collaborate to create and present shared products that communicate their thinking clearly, include evidence-based captions or poem lines, listen to multiple perspectives, and reflect on how their own sense of self connects to place. They build confidence as learners by making choices, contributing their strengths, responding to peer questions, and revising their ideas through daily feedback and reflection.

Students will create a text-based project journal with sketches, annotations, quickwrites, and evidence from the central text, images, and observations that connect identity, belonging, and place. In small groups, they will make a mixed-media poster that maps how humans, land, water, animals, and weather shape one another, with brief evidence captions and written responses to peer questions, along with a collaborative collage of photos, drawings, and quotes about identity and belonging in relation to place. Each student will also produce a short poem about what makes us human, presented over a stop-motion animation of a collage portrait built from visual elements connected to the text. The final product will be a small-group exhibit for the Roots and Ripples Expo that combines the poster, collage, poem animation, and a brief oral presentation.

Begin with a shared read-aloud and image walk from the anchor text, pausing for students to notice words, images, and ideas about identity, belonging, and humans’ relationships with land, water, animals, and weather. Then move into the “human museum” experience with mirrors, natural objects, body diagrams, and quotes from the text so teams can record patterns, evidence, and questions such as “What makes us human?” and “How do we exist in relation to our surroundings?” Follow with fast partner collage identity snapshots using photos, drawings, and words from the text and students’ own experiences, then have each pair share one caption. Close by co-creating a few lines of a class poem from the text-inspired questions and pairing it with a quick stop-motion demo using paper collage pieces.

Host a “Roots and Ripples Expo” as a gallery walk where small groups display their mixed-media posters, identity-and-belonging collages, and stop-motion poem portraits alongside short quotes or evidence from the project text. Students act as exhibit guides, briefly explaining how the text shaped their thinking about what makes us human and how people relate to land, water, animals, and weather, then respond to peer, family, or staff questions. Add a visitor response station with sticky notes or audio prompts connected to key lines or ideas from the text, plus a reflection wall inviting responses about identity, belonging, and place. Close with quick reflection circles where students share a voice note or sketch from their journals naming one insight from the text and one connection they see between themselves and their surroundings.