GALLS GALORE ALIGNMENT WITH
NEXT GENERATION SCIENCE STANDARDS
The activities in this unit help children understand the basic concepts in the Disciplinary Core Ideas listed here. You can use the following list as a guide for lesson planning. These Disciplinary Core Ideas are taken from Grade Band Endpoints in A Framework for K-12 Science Education. Additionally, our activities give children opportunities to engage in many of the Science and Engineering Practices and reflect on the Crosscutting Concepts as identified in the Next Generation Science Standards.
Grades K-2 Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS1A: All organisms have external parts. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, move from place to place, and seek, find and take in food, water and air. Plants also have different parts (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits) that help them survive, grow, and produce more plants. p.144
LS1B: Plants and animals have predictable characteristics at different stages of development. Plants and animals grow and change. Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive. p.146
LS1C: All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. Plants need water and light to live and grow. p.147
LS1D: Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive (e.g. find food, run from a predator). Plants also respond to some external inputs (e.g. turn leaves toward the sun). p.149
LS2A: Animals depend on their surroundings to get what they need, including food, water, shelter, and a favorable temperature. Animals depend on plants or other animals for food. They use their senses to find food and water and their body parts to gather, catch, eat, and chew the food. Plants depend on air, water, minerals (in the soil), and light to grow. p.151
LS3A: Organisms have characteristics that can be similar or different. Plants also are very much, but not exactly, like their parents and resemble other plants of the same kind. p.158
LS3B: Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. p.160
LS4C: Living things can survive only where their needs are met. p.165
LS4D: There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water. p.166
Grades 3-5 Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS1A: Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior and reproduction. p.144
LS1B: Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles that include being born (sprouting in plants), growing, developing into adults, reproducing, and eventually dying. p.146
LS1C: Animals and plants alike generally need to take in air and water, animals must take in food, and plants need light and minerals; p.148
LS1D: Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of info, which may then be processed & integrated by an animal’s brain, with some information stored as memories. Animals are able to use their perceptions & memories to guide their actions. Some responses to information are instinctive – that is, animals’ brains are organized so that they do not have to think about how to respond to certain stimuli. p.149
LS2A: The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Either way, they are “consumers.” p.151-152
LS3A: Many characteristics of organisms are inherited from their parents. Other characteristics result from individuals’ interactions with the environment, which can range from diet to learning. Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment. p.158
LS4D: Scientists have identified and classified many plants and animals. p.167
Grades 6-8 Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS1B: Organisms reproduce, either sexually or asexually, and transfer their genetic information to their offspring. Animals engage in characteristic behaviors that increase the odds of reproduction. p.146
LS2A: Organisms and populations of organisms are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Similarly, predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Although the species involved in these competitive and predatory interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments, both living and nonliving, are shared. p.152
LS4D: Biodiversity is the wide range of existing life forms that have adapted to the variety of conditions on Earth, from terrestrial to marine ecosystems. Biodiversity includes genetic variation within a species, in addition to species variation in different habitats and ecosystem types (e.g., forests, grasslands, wetlands.) p.167
GALLS GALORE ALIGNMENT WITH
COMMON CORE STANDARDS
In addition to science content, activities in this unit also can help students to practice the following mathematics and language arts concepts. The Common Core Standards listed here are in addition to the ones that our activities typically address, as listed in the Four Winds document, The Nature Program: Alignment with Learning Standards.
Grades K-2 Common Core Standards
Mathematics Standard K.MD: Directly compare two objects with a measurable attribute in common, to see which object has “more of”/”less of” the attribute, and describe the difference.
Grades 3-5 Common Core Standards
Reading for Informational Text Standard 7: Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, time lines).
Nearby Nature 