EROSION 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
PS2B: When objects touch or collide, they push on one another and can change motion or shape. p.117
LS2C: The places where plants and animals live often change, sometimes slowly and sometimes rapidly. p.155
ESS1C: Some events on Earth occur in cycles, like day and night, and others have a beginning and an end, like a volcanic eruption. Some events, like an earthquake, happen very quickly; others, such as the formation of the Grand Canyon, occur very slowly, over a time period much longer than one can observe. p.178
ESS2A: Wind and water can change the shape of the land. The resulting landforms, together with the materials on the land, provide homes for living things. p.180
ESS2C: Water exists as solid ice and in liquid form. It carries soil and rocks from one place to another and determines the variety of life forms that can live in a particular location. p.184
ESS2E: Plants and animals (including humans) depend on the land, water, and air to live and grow. They in turn can change their environment (e.g., the shape of land, the flow of water). p.190
ESS3C: Things that people do to live comfortably can affect the world around them. But they can make choices that reduce their impacts on the land, water, air, and other living things. p.195
ETS1A: A situation that people want to change or create can be approached as a problem to be solved through engineering. Such problems may have many acceptable solutions. Asking questions, making observations, and gathering information are helpful in thinking about problems. Before beginning to design a solution, it is important to clearly understand the problem. p.205
ETS1B: Designs can be conveyed through sketches, drawings, or physical models. These representations are useful in communicating ideas for a problem’s solutions to other people. p.207
ETS1C: Because there is always more than one possible solution to a problem, it is useful to compare designs, test them, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. p.209
Grades 3-5 Disciplinary Core Ideas
PS2C: Changes can happen very quickly or very slowly and are sometimes hard to see (e.g., plant growth). p.119
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
ESS1C: Earth has changed over time. Understanding how landforms develop, are weathered (broken down into smaller pieces), and erode (get transported elsewhere) can help infer the history of the current landscape. Local, regional, and global patterns of rock formations reveal changes over time due to Earth forces, such as earthquakes. p.178
ESS2A: Rainfall helps shape the land and affects the types of living things found in a region. Water, ice, wind, living organisms, and gravity break rocks, soils, and sediments into smaller particles and move them around. Human activities affect Earth’s systems and their interactions at its surface. p.181
ESS2C: The downhill movement of water as it flows to the ocean shapes the appearance of the land. p.185
ESS2E: Living things affect the physical characteristics of their regions (e.g., plants’ roots hold soil in place, beaver shelters and human-built dams alter the flow of water). p.190
ESS3C: Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have had major effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, air, and even outer space. But individuals and communities are doing things to help protect Earth’s resources and environments. For example, they are reducing the amounts of materials they use or the runoff from agricultural activities. p.196
ETS1A: Possible solutions to a problem are limited by available materials and resources (constraints). The success of a designed solution is determined by considering the desired features of a solution (criteria). Different proposals for solutions can be compared on the basis of how well each one meets the specified criteria for success or how well each takes the constraints into account. p.205
ETS1B: An often productive way to generate ideas is for people to work together to brainstorm, test, and refine possible solutions. At whatever stage, communicating with peers about proposed solutions is an important part of the design process, and shared ideas can lead to improved designs. p.207
ETS1C: Different solutions need to be tested in order to determine which of them best solves the problem, given the criteria and the constraints. p.209
Grades 6-8 Disciplinary Core Ideas
PS2C: With no energy inputs, a system starting out in an unstable state will continue to change until it reaches a stable configuration (e.g., sand in an hourglass). p.120
LS2C: Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all of its populations. p.155
ESS1C: The geological time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth’s history. Major historical events include the formation of mountain chains and ocean basins, the evolution and extinction of particular living organisms, volcanic eruptions, periods of massive glaciation, and development of watersheds and rivers through glaciation and water erosion. p.178
ESS2A: The planet’s systems interact over scales that range from microscopic to global in size, and they operate over fractions of a second to billions of years. p.181
ESS2C: Water’s movements—both on the land and underground—cause weathering and erosion, which change the land’s surface features and create underground formations. p.185
ESS3C: Human activities have altered the biosphere, sometimes damaging or destroying natural habitats. But changes to Earth’s environments can have different impacts (negative and positive) for different living things. Typically, as human populations and per-capita consumption of natural resources increase, so do the negative impacts on Earth unless the activities involved are engineered otherwise. p.196
ETS1A: The more precisely a design task’s criteria and constraints can be defined, the more likely it is that the designed solution will be successful. p.205
ETS1B: A solution needs to be tested, and then modified on the basis of the test results, in order to improve it. In any case, it is important to be able to communicate and explain solutions to others. p.208
EROSION 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
Language Standard 5: Identify real-life connections between words and their use.
Mathematics Standard K.CC: Count to 100 by ones and tens. Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities; connect counting to cardinality.
Mathematics Standard 2.MD : Measure to determine how much longer one object is than another, expressing the length difference in terms of a standards length unit.
Grade 3-5 Common Core
Mathematics Standard 4.MD : Measure angles in whole-number degrees using a protractor.
Nearby Nature 