The Cultivating Washington curriculum is intended to be a go-to resource for Washington state middle school educators seeking student-centered instructional materials that make learning about the history of the Pacific Northwest more relevant and meaningful for students.In addition, it is a resource for agricultural education teachers, parents, and community members interested in helping students discover the history and development of agriculture in the state of Washington.

This lesson is designed for students to learn basic social justice vocabulary, such as systemic racism and analyze if equity matters. Through vocabulary development of terms around race relations and equity, along with the analysis of two articles, students will gain an understanding of equity in social organizations. Finally, using the articles, the content-specific vocabulary and their own schema, students will discuss if equity matters in a Socratic seminar.

In this resource, students will interpret the meanings of poems using similes and metaphors. The featured resource in the teacher modeling and guided practice sections utilizes the text Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad.

Students will receive exposure to new vocabulary, then read and annotate an article, discuss, and engage in a writing exercise, focused on the Iroquois Confederacy.  

Food waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas. Wasted food and the resources to produce that food are responsible for approximately 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In this storyline, students learn about the resources required to produce food through following the carbon cycle and discover how food waste contributes to climate change. They will also learn the farm to table transport chain as well as how to conduct a food waste audit. Finally, the students will research solutions to the problem of food waste that can be applicable to their own lives, their school, and their community. 

Sea level is rising due to climate changes that result from increased emissions of greenhouse gases. In this storyline, students will explore mechanisms of sea level rise and the impacts on Indigenous peoples along with other groups such as urban communities. Natural hazards such as erosion, storm surges, and flooding are intensified by sea level rise. The effects on natural resources, the economies built from those natural resources, and land usage in general can be predicted by utilizing current and historical data.

 This inquiry unit leads students through the different perspectives behind a decision to have a dam removed. This unit looks at similar Washington state dam removal decisions as well as the complex issue of having the Election dam removed near Puyallup, WA. Students will be introduced to the stories and traditional ways of knowing about salmon that the Puyallup Tribe has built their culture upon. Then they will explore the science behind hydroelectricity and build models to discover how carbon neutral energy is gathered through hydro dams. This inquiry unit ends with students researching different perspectives surrounding the current (2021) decision to remove the Electron dam including: the Tribe’s Fishery department, the ecosystem, the city council, the fishermen and the hydro-electrical company who currently owns the dam. With their research, students will do a socratic seminar to mimic the court case lawsuit that is ongoing against the Electron Dam. 

Objectives of this mini unit:For students to explore the "universal call to action" laid out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and consider how they may respond to that call;Build background knowledge about specific issues impacting the Arctic including: indigenous rights, indigenous health, biodiversity, tourism and marine pollution; Build background knowledge about specific issues impacting their local communtiy (using Michigan as a case-study) including: hunger, homelessness, poverty, youth violence and the environment;Create an action plan to address needs within their local communities driven by their unique passions, interests and skills;Consider the importance of impact vs intention when engaging with community action projects

This 18 day unit explicitly teaches text structures, summary, text features, reading informational text about Mesopotamia, and writing a book about Mesopotamia. Instruction moves from high scaffolding to moderate scaffolding to independent practice as students become familiar with the various text structures, how to identify them, what graphic organizer will work with each text structure, how to use notes recorded in graphic organizers to write summaries, and how to compile an informational book. Mesopotamia is the content used as an anchor.

Students will be exploring the idea of ecosystems and wildfires. They will become familiar with what an ecosystem is and how to keep them healthy. Students will also see the positive and negative effects of wildfires on ecosystems. Also how wildfires influence the local government and federal government when it comes to land management.