CONIFER CLUES 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. 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. p.146
LS1C: All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. p.147
LS3B: Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. p.160
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
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. Plants reproduce in a variety of ways, sometimes depending on animal behavior and specialized features (such as attractively colored flowers) for reproduction. p.146
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
CONIFER CLUES 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
Reading Standard for Informational Text 5: Know and use various text features to locate key facts or information in a text efficiently.
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.OA: Use addition and subtraction within 100 to solve one- and two-step word problems involving situations of adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart, and comparing, with unknowns in all positions, e.g., by using drawings and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.
Mathematics Standard 2.MD: Measure the length of an object by selecting and using appropriate tools such as rulers, yardsticks, meter sticks and measuring tapes.
Grades 3-5 Common Core Standards
Mathematics Standard 3.MD: Generate measurement data by measuring lengths using rulers marked with halves and fourths of an inch.
Nearby Nature 