PREDATORS AND PREY 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. p.144
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 – 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. They use their senses to find food and water and their body parts to gather, catch, eat, and chew the food. p.151
LS2B: Organisms obtain the materials they need to grow and survive from the environment. Many of these materials come from organisms and are used again by other organisms. p.153
LS2D: Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, & cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size. p.156
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
LS1C: Animals and plants alike generally need to take in air and water, animals must take in food. 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: Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information. 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.” … Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life. p.151-152
Grades 6-8 Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS2A: Organisms and populations of organisms are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. 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, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments, both living and nonliving, are shared. p.152
LS2B: Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers (generally plants and other organisms that engage in photosynthesis), consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact—primarily for food—within an ecosystem. p.153
LS2D: Groups … engage in a variety of signaling behaviors to maintain the group’s integrity or to warn of threats. p.157
PREDATORS AND PREY 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.
Grades 3-5 Common Core Standards
Mathematics Standard 3.MD: Draw a scaled picture graph and a scaled bar graph to represent a data set with several categories. Solve one- and two-step “how many more” and “how many less” problems using information presented in scaled bar graphs.
Nearby Nature 