POND LIFE 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
LS1B: Plants and animals have predictable characteristics at different stages of development. Plants and animals grow and change. 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
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. Different plants survive better in different settings because they have varied needs for water, minerals, and sunlight. p.151
LS3A: Organisms have characteristics that can be similar or different. Young animals are very much, but not exactly, like their parents and also resemble other animals of the same kind. Plants also are very much, but not exactly, like their parents and resemble other plants of the same kind. p.158
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
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
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: Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles that include being born, growing, developing into adults, reproducing, and eventually dying. p.146
LS1C: Animals and plants alike generally need to take in air and water. p.148
LS2A: Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. 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
LS4D: Populations of organisms live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there. p.167
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, plants’ respiration affects the air). p.190
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
LS2C: Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth’s terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem’s biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health. p.155
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
POND LIFE 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 3-5 Common Core Standards
Reading for Informational Text Standard 7: Draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently.
Grades 6-8 Common Core Standards
Reading for Literature Standard 10: By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas and poems, in the grades 6-8 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.
Nearby Nature 