Cartoon Animation and Films in Literature: Intrinsic to Physics

This curriculum unit is written to increase basic knowledge and awareness for students and teachers in approaching the subject of physics in the English Language Arts classroom setting. This curriculum unit is targeted specifically to be successful in the high school Honors classroom programs, as well as the gifted or advanced classroom. This unit utilizes state standards in Science and Technology; Reading, Writing, and Speaking; and a few standards from Mathematics. It also encompasses and uses some of the standards from the Arts and Humanities listing. As a result of teachers using this unit, students will become competent in encountering and including science knowledge and inquiry in more diverse subject areas. Students will be lead to investigate rules of physics as seen being broken or not, in cartoons and film. Students will be encouraged to become accomplished in implementation of physics principles and the study of science.

Students will be prompted to further their knowledge and/or span the uses of language through literary works, scientific terminology and symbols. This will aid in increasing students’ ability to read, analyze and comprehend informational text that translates for use in their everyday lives. In acquiring scientific knowledge, students will be instructed to integrate their knowledge of writing and constructing hypotheses while observing, analyzing and reading scientific data in the English Language Arts content area. This will allow students to formulate useful questions that provoke scientific inquiry. Using the varied literary elements and themes, students will be provided with fundamental physics concepts via popular film and cartooning viewing that integrate with critical analysis of significant literary concepts.