Category: Grade 3 Science

Life Cycles & Traits, Part II: Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems

Unit description: In Part I, students explore the similarities and differences between plant and animal life cycles, how traits are inherited from parents, and how the environment can influence the inheritance of those traits. In Part II, students study how the organisms in an ecosystem impact and depend on each other for survival.

Download the complete Grade 3 Science Unit 3 framework to customize for your own planning.

Essential Questions and Big Ideas

Part I: Life Cycles and Traits

• Do living things grow and develop the same?
  • Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles. (3-LS1-1)
• Why do living things look similar to their parents?
  • Many characteristics of organisms are inherited from their parents. (3-LS3-1)
  • Different organisms vary in how they look and function because they have different inherited information. (3-LS3-1)
• Can the environment change the way a plant or animal looks?
  • Other characteristics result from individuals’ interactions with the environment, which can range from diet to learning. (3-LS3-2)
  • Some characteristics result from the interactions of both inheritance and the effect of the environment. (3-LS3-2)
  • The environment also affects the traits that an organism develops. (3-LS3-2)
• Why do some animals or plants survive better than others?
  • Sometimes the differences in characteristics between individuals of the same species provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing. (3-LS4-2)

Part II: Interdependence in Ecosystems

• How do plants and animals help each other?
  • Being part of a group helps some animals obtain food, defend themselves, and survive. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size. (3-LS2-1)
• How do we know what plants and animals looked like many years ago?
  • Some kinds of plants and animals that once lived on Earth are no longer found anywhere. (3-LS4-1)
  • Fossils provide evidence about the types of organisms that lived long ago and also about the nature of their environments. (3-LS4-1)
• What makes some living things survive better than others?
  • For any particular environment, some kinds of organisms survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all. (3-LS4-3)
• What happens to plants and animals when the environment changes?
  • Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there. (3-LS4-4)
  • 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. (secondary to 3-LS4-4)

Prerequisite Skills/Science & Engineering Practices

Develop models to describe concepts, analyze and interpret data to provide evidence, use evidence to construct and/or support an explanation, make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem.

Forces & Interactions

Suggested timeframe: Winter (Jan-March)

Unit description: Students explore the relationship between force and motion by observing patterns, cause and effect. Students study the relationship between objects and electric and magnetic forces.

Essential Questions and Big Ideas

What causes things to move?

• • Objects in contact exert forces on each other. (3-PS2-1)
  • Each force acts on one particular object and has both strength and a direction. An object at rest typically has multiple forces acting on it, but they add to give zero net force on the object. Forces that do not sum to zero can cause changes in the object’s speed or direction of motion. (3-PS2-1)

How can we use observations to predict motion and design solutions to engineering problems?

• • The patterns of an object’s motion in various situations can be observed and measured; when that past motion exhibits a regular pattern, future motion can be predicted from it. (3-PS2-2)

How do we use electric and magnetic forces in everyday life?

• • Electric and magnetic forces between a pair of objects do not require that the objects be in contact. The sizes of the forces in each situation depend on the properties of the objects and their distances apart and, for forces between two magnets, on their orientation relative to each other. (3-PS2-3),(3-PS2-4)

Prerequisite Skills/Science & Engineering Practices

Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence, make observations/measurements to provide evidence, ask questions to determine cause and effect, define a simple design problem

Download the complete Grade 3 Science Unit 2 framework to customize for your own planning.

Weather and Climate

Students learn about Earth processes that contribute to various types of weather. They analyze and interpret data and information to learn about weather patterns and climate from a local and global perspective. Students learn about Earth processes that result in natural hazards, and ways to reduce the impact of weather-related hazards.

Standards

• 3-ESS2-1: Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.
• 3-ESS2-2: Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world. 
• 3-ESS2-3: Plan and conduct an investigation to determine the connections between weather and water processes in Earth systems.
• 3-ESS3-1: Make a claim about the merit of a design solution that reduces the impacts of a weather-related hazard.

Essential Questions and Big Ideas of the Unit

• How do we find out about weather and climate?
  • Scientists record patterns of the weather across different times and areas so that they can make predictions about what kind of weather might happen next. (3-ESS2-1)
  • Climate describes a range of an area’s typical weather conditions and the extent to which those conditions vary over years. (3-ESS2-2)
  • Earth’s processes continuously cycle water, contributing to weather and climate. (3-ESS2-3)
• How does weather and climate affect our everyday life?
  • A variety of natural hazards result from natural processes. Humans cannot eliminate natural hazards but can take steps to reduce their impacts. (3-ESS3-1)

Download the complete Grade 3 Science Unit 1 framework to customize for your own planning.