WINTER WAYS 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
LS1C: All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. p.147
LS1D: Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival – for example, eyes for light, ears for sounds, and skin for temperature or touch. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive (e.g. find food, run from a predator). 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. p.151
LS2C: The places where plants and animals live often change, sometimes slowly and sometimes rapidly. When animals and plants get too hot or cold, they may die. If they cannot find enough food, water, or air, they may die. p.155
LS2D: Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. p.156
LS4C: Living things can survive only where their needs are met. If some places are too hot or too cold or have too little water or food, plants and animals may not be able to live there. 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
ESS2D: Weather is the combination of sunlight, wind, snow or rain, and temperature in a particular region at a particular time. p.188
Grades 3-5 Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS1C: Animals and plants alike generally need to take in air and water, animals must take in food, and plants need light and minerals. Food provides animals with the materials they need for body repair and growth, is digested to release energy to maintain body warmth and for motion. p.148
LS1D: Animals are able to use their perceptions and 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: Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. p.151-152
LS2C: When the environment changes in ways that affect a place’s physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of resources, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die. p.155
LS4C: Changes in an organism’s habitat are sometimes beneficial to it and sometimes harmful. For any particular environment, some kinds of organisms survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all. p.165
LS4D: Scientists have identified and classified many plants and animals. Populations of organisms live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there. p.167
PS1B: When two or more different substances are mixed, a new substance with different properties may be formed; such occurrences depend on the substances and the temperature. p.110-111
Grades 6-8 Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS1C: Animals obtain food from eating plants or eating other animals. p.148
LS2A: Organisms and populations of organisms are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. 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. p.167
PS1B: Substances react chemically in characteristic ways. In a chemical process, the atoms that make up the original substances are regrouped into different molecules, and these new substances have different properties from those of the reactants. p.111
WINTER WAYS 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.CC: Count to 100 by ones and tens. Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities; connect counting to cardinality. Count to answer “how many?” questions about as many as 20 things.
Mathematics Standard 2.MD: Draw a picture graph and a bar graph (with single unit scale) to represent a data set with up to four categories. Solve simple compare problems
with information presented in a bar graph.
Nearby Nature 