Horses

Discuss the use of horses in people's lives. Find pictures of people riding horses, or using horses in farm work, cattle herding, or transportation.  Talk about horses students know or have seen.

Using the nonfiction text The Pony Express, use critical reading techniques to read and answer literal and inferential comprehension questions about the text

Have students select a specific breed of horse and create an oral presentation about the breed to include history, physical details, domestic uses, and any other useful details.

Provide photographs of horse breeds and have students sort them on the basis of coloring, spots, leg hair, shape, etc.

Using these guidelines, share the method used for measuring horses. Students measure each other using this method. Create a chart using miniature hand images to represent each student's height. 

Have students research the term horsepower. (Horsepower is a unit of power that is approximately how much work one horse can do, equal to 746 watts.)  Find details of common engines and other machines that will generate energy in measures of horsepower. Organize measurements in order from smallest to largest. Convert horsepower measures to energy in terms of watts. 

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

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.

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.

Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive.  Information should be obtained from text readings and media provided by the teacher. Examples of patterns of behaviors could include the signals that offspring make (such as crying, cheeping, and other vocalizations) and the responses of the parents (such as feeding, comforting, and protecting the offspring).

Young animals are very much, but not exactly, like their parents. Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. Examples of patterns could include features plants or animals share. Observations could include that a particular breed of animal 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 on land and in water. Emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

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 of organisms are inherited from their parents. Different organisms vary in how they look and function because they have different inherited information.

Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment. The environment affects the traits that an animal develops; some characteristics result from individuals' interactions with the environment. 

Examples of evidence could include needs, characteristics of the organisms, and habitats involved. The organisms and their habitat make up a system in which the parts depend on each other.

Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior, and reproduction. Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc. Examples of structures could include heart, stomach, lung, brain, and skin. 

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.

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 fossils of extinct organisms.

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

Emphasis is on explanations of the relationships among organisms in terms of similarity or differences of the gross appearance of anatomical structures. Anatomical similarities and differences between various organisms living today and between them and organisms in the fossil record enable the classification of living things.

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 about the influence of humans on genetic outcomes in artificial selection (such as animal husbandry), and on the influence these technologies have on society as well as the technologies leading to these scientific discoveries.

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.