SKULL SLEUTHING 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. 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. 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
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. 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
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, and plants need light and minerals. p.148
LS3B: Different organisms vary in how they look and function because they have different inherited information. In each kind of organism there is variation in the traits themselves, and different kinds of organisms may have different versions of the trait. The environment also affects the traits that an organism develops – differences in where they grow or in the food they consume may cause organisms that are related to end up looking or behaving differently. p.160
Grades 6-8 Disciplinary Core Ideas
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
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
SKULL SLEUTHING 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.
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
Reading for Informational Text Standard 7: Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams,
time lines, animations, or interactive elements on Web pages).
Nearby Nature 