Fish

Read What's It Like to Be a Fish? by Wendy Pfeffer. While reading, point out book parts, author, illustrator, text features, vocabulary, and details about fish.

Pose questions such as "Fish must live in water. Why?" "Fish have scales. Why?"  Students search texts to provide reasons for these facts. 

Read about the biological nature of fish, how they locate food, how they move, breathe, reproduce and protect themselves. Get into small groups to discuss how a fish has adapted to its environment and how its habits are specific to the water. 

Practice counting by tens by grouping manipulatives such as fish crackers, fish-shaped cutouts or other objects into groups of ten. Count the groups. Refer to the groups as schools of fish.

Write grade level appropriate numbers on the back of fish images for your class. Allow students to select two fish at random and combine the numbers by adding or subtracting as instructed. Check for accuracy using a calculator.

Given that one inch of fish requires 2 gallons of water, figure out how many gallons of water would be needed in a fish tank for three one-inch fish, for five two-inch fish, etc.  How many one-inch fish could be held in a 30-gallon tank, or how many six-inch fish could be held in a 50-gallon tank? 

All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. Plants need water and light to live and grow. Examples of observations could include the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals and that all living things need water.

Plants and animals can change their environment. 

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land. They live in places that have the things they need. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

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.  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.

Individuals of the same kind of plant or 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.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places. Emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Water is found in the ocean, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Water exists as solid ice and in liquid form.

Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles. Changes organisms go through during their life form a pattern.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size.

Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment. The environment affects the traits that an organism develops.

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.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.

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.

Energy and fuels that are modified from natural sources affect the environment in multiple ways.  Examples of renewable energy resources could include wind energy, water behind dams, and sunlight; non-renewable energy resources are fossil fuels and atomic energy. Examples of environmental effects could include biological effects from moving parts, erosion, change of habitat, and pollution.

The energy released from food was once energy from the Sun. The energy was captured by plants in the chemical process that forms plant matter. 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.

Some kinds of plants and animals that once lived on Earth are no longer found anywhere. Fossils provide evidence about the types of organisms that lived long ago and also about the nature of their environments. Examples of data could include type, size, and distributions of fossil organisms.  Examples of fossils and environments could include marine fossils found on dry land.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. An example of cause and effect relationships could be that  animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there. 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. Examples of environmental changes could include changes in land characteristics, water distribution, temperature, food, and other organisms.

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. Newly introduced species can damage the balance of an ecosystem.  

Nearly all of Earth's available water is in the ocean. Most freshwater is in glaciers or underground; only a tiny fraction is in streams, lakes, wetlands, and the atmosphere.

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, and air. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

In multicellular organisms, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues and organs that are specialized for particular body functions.

Living things share certain characteristics. (These include response to environment, reproduction, energy use, growth and development, life cycles, made of cells, etc.) Organisms reproduce, either sexually or asexually, and transfer their genetic information to their offspring. Examples should include both biotic and abiotic items, and should be defended using accepted characteristics of life.

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.

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 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.

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. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the soil in terrestrial environments or to the water in aquatic environments. The atoms that make up the
organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem. 

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 all 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.

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. Changes in biodiversity can influence humans’ resources as well as ecosystem services that humans rely on. There are systematic processes for evaluating solutions with respect to how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a problem.

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.

In artificial selection, humans have the capacity to influence certain characteristics of organisms by selective breeding. One can choose desired parental traits determined by genes, which are then passed to offspring. Emphasis is on identifying and communicating information from reliable sources about the influence of humans on genetic outcomes in artificial selection (such as genetic modification and animal husbandry.)

Adaptation by natural selection acting over generations is one important process by which species change over time in response to changes in environmental conditions. Traits that support successful survival and reproduction in the new environment become more common; those that do not become less common.  

Human activities can positively and negatively influence the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and ecosystems. Examples of the design process include examining human interactions and designing feasible solutions that promote stewardship. Examples can include water usage (such as stream and river use, aquifer recharge, or dams and levee construction); land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, wetland benefits, stream reclamation, or fire restoration); and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

Technology and engineering can potentially help us best manage natural resources as populations increase. Examples of evidence include grade-appropriate databases on human populations and the rates of consumption of food and natural resources (such as freshwater, mineral, and energy). Examples of effects can include changes made to the appearance, composition, and structure of Earth’s systems as well as the rates at which they change. 

Current scientific models indicate that human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion, can contribute to the present-day measured rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature. Examples of evidence can include tables, graphs, and maps of global and regional temperatures; atmospheric levels of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane; and natural resource use. Natural activities, such as changes in incoming solar radiation, also contribute to changing global temperatures.