The authors--a second grade classroom teacher and a university professor of education--decided to collaborate. Melanie wanted to find out if she could help her students increase their reading and writing comprehension by presenting a sequence of events in an activity (for example, the steps in building a house) and then have the students write the steps in proper order. Robert wanted to study whether the notion of "cultural universals" was a useful basis for developing lessons in the second grade in East Texas (as it had been in a Michigan classroom). In this article, the authors aim to describe how they went about this collaboration, to report their results, and to provide elementary teachers with instructional strategies for creating an interdisciplinary unit of study (involving social studies and language arts) on the topic of shelter. (Contains 10 notes and 3 resources.)