Here are correlations to the National Common Core Language and Math standards and to the Idaho State Science Standards. If you'd like, you may go directly to the Idaho science standards for this topic. For more information about the overall standards, see the complete Idaho Content Standards for Science, the Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core Language standards, or the Common Core Math standards.
With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.
Make a bear book. Draw and name the 8 kinds of bears. Write one sentence about each kind of bear.
Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
Smokey Bear represents being careful with fire. Create a fictional story of your own using an animal that represents a different safety concern. For example, turtles and their shells could represent wearing bike helmets.
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.
Using this Center for Wildlife Information page, see if you can answer the online bear quiz.
Describe measurable attributes of objects, such as length or weight. Describe several measurable attributes of a single object.
Read Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carl and compare the sizes of the animals in the story.
Use addition and subtraction within 20 to solve word problems involving situations of adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart, and comparing, with unknowns in all positions, e.g., by using objects, drawings, and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.
Black bears or their relatives live on all continents except Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. Write an equation that represents the continents where black bears do live. Solve and label your answer.
Measure the length of an object by selecting and using appropriate tools such as rulers, yardsticks, meter sticks, and measuring tapes.
Place teacher-made clipart bear paw prints of various sizes on cards. Measure them using rulers.
Recognize a statistical question as one that anticipates variability in the data related to the question and accounts for it in the answers. For example, “How old am I?” is not a statistical question, but “How old are the students in my school?” is a statistical question because one anticipates variability in students' ages.
Create a statistical question about bears. Using the internet and other sources, attempt to find the answer to the question.
Use observations to describe patterns of what plants and animals (including humans) need to survive.
Examples of patterns could include that all animals need food in order to live and grow, and the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals. Animals obtain their food from plants or from other animals.
Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants and animals and the places they live.
Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system
Use materials to design a solution to a human problem by mimicking how plants or animals use their external parts to help them survive, grow, and meet their needs.
Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, move from place to place, and seek and take in food.
Read texts and use media to determine patterns in behavior of parents and offspring that help offspring survive.
Adult animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive. Examples of patterns of behaviors could include the signals that offspring make and the responses of the parents (such as feeding, comforting, and protecting the offspring)
Develop models to describe that organisms have unique and diverse life cycles, but all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death.
Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Changes animals go through during their life form a pattern.
Make observations to construct an evidence-based account that young plants and animals are like, but not exactly like, their parents.
Individuals of the same kind of animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. Young animals are very much, but not exactly like, their parents. An individual of a particular breed looks like its parents but is not exactly the same.
Make observations of plants and animals to compare the diversity of life in different habitats
There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land. The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.
Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment
Interactions with the environment affect the characteristics that organisms develop.
Construct an argument that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.
Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.
Use a model to describe that animals receive different types of information through their senses, process the information in their brain, and respond to the information in different ways.
Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal's brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions.
Develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment.
The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. 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.
Use models to describe that energy in animals' food (used for body repair, growth, motion, and to maintain body warmth) was once energy from the sun.
Food provides animals with the materials they need for body repair and growth and the energy they need to maintain body warmth and for motion. The energy released from food was once energy from the sun that was captured by plants in the chemical process that forms plant matter.
Use evidence to construct an explanation for how the variations in characteristics among individuals of the same species may provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.
Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. An example of cause and effect relationships could be animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.
Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
Examples of evidence could include needs and characteristics of the animals and habitats involved. The organisms and their habitat make up a system in which the parts depend on each other.
Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.
Changes in environments affect the organisms living there. Examples of environmental changes could include changes in land characteristics, water distribution, and other organisms. When the environment changes, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die.
Use argument supported by evidence for how a living organism is a system of interacting subsystems composed of groups of cells.
In multicellular animals, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues. Tissues form organs that are specialized for particular body functions.
Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.
Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.
Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.
Predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared. Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.
Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.
Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.
Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in its populations. Emphasis is on recognizing patterns in data and making warranted inferences about changes in populations, and on evaluating empirical evidence supporting arguments about changes to ecosystems.
Construct an explanation based on evidence that describes how genetic variations of traits in a population increase some individuals' probability of surviving and reproducing in a specific environment.
Natural selection leads to the predominance of certain traits in a population, and the suppression of others. Emphasis is on using concepts of natural selection in animals, such as overproduction of offspring, passage of time, variation in a population, selection of favorable traits, and heritability of traits.
Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth's ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health.
Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
Examples of human impacts can include water usage, land usage, and pollution. Examples of the design process include examining human environmental impacts, assessing the kinds of solutions that are feasible, and designing and evaluating solutions that could reduce that impact.
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