GRASSES AND GRAINS 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 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: Plants need water and light to live and grow. p.147
LS2A: 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. Plants also are very much, but not exactly, like their parents and resemble other plants of the same kind. p.158
LS3B: Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. p.160
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
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
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. Humans, like all other organisms, obtain living and nonliving resources from their environments. p.167
Grades 6-8 Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS1B: 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. p.167
GRASSES AND GRAINS 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
Language Standard 1: Use frequently occurring adjectives.
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.
Nearby Nature 