Wetlands


Standards

Idaho State Standards

Here are correlations to the Idaho State Language and Math standards and to the Idaho State Science Standards. For more information about the overall standards, see the complete Idaho Content Standards for Science, the Next Generation Science Standards, and the alignment between Idaho and NGSS Science Standards. You may also access the Idaho English Language Arts/Literacy Standards and Mathematics Standards.

Language

Second Grade

ELA/Literacy 2.RS.IP.1

With support as needed, conduct short research tasks to take some action or make informal presentations by gathering information from experiences and provided sources (including read-alouds), and organizing information using graphic organizers or other aids.

Suggested Lesson

Together as a class, research wetlands in general, noting specifically what makes a wetland unique. Create a list of wetland-specific animals, plants, and environments. From that, generate a class or small-group diorama of a wetland.

Third Grade

ELA/Literacy 3.RC.TC.1

Independently and proficiently read and comprehend texts representing a balance of genres, cultures, and perspectives that exhibit complexity at the higher end of the grades 2–3 band.

Suggested Lesson

Take a field trip to a local wetland environment that includes a map or brochure about the area. As students explore the wetland, have them identify their location and associated points of interest based on the map. Later, have students create their own map of the wetland and label the plants, animals, and other important objects they saw in and around the wetland.

Sixth Grade

ELA/Literacy 6.W.RW.3

Write informational texts that introduce the topic, develop the focus with relevant facts, definitions, concrete details, quotations, and examples from multiple sources using appropriate strategies.

Suggested Lesson

Visit the website Give Water a Hand and look over the Action Guides and project Success Stories. Then have students write up a proposal for selecting a service project to help a wetland in your area. Present the proposals to the class. Students could vote on the best proposal and perform the service project together.

Math

Second Grade

Math 2.MD.A.1

Measure the length of an object by selecting and using appropriate tools such as rulers, yardsticks, meter sticks, and measuring tapes.

Suggested Lesson

Gather cattails for your class to measure the heads. Label each cattail with a sticker marked A, B, etc. to make sure students have the chance to measure each one.

Fourth Grade

Math 4.MD.A.2

Use the four operations to solve word problems involving measurements. Include problems involving simple fractions or decimals.

Suggested Lesson

Plants in a wetland actually hold water in the soil. Weigh some common plants before and after watering, for a period of weeks, to determine the average amount of water the roots will hold in the soil. Allow the plant to become as dry as possible between watering. For a faster experiment with water-weight measurement, compare the water retention ability of wetlands to that of other materials using Amazing Wetlands: The Giant Sponge Effect.

Sixth Grade

Math 6.NS.C.5

Understand that positive and negative numbers are used together to describe quantities having opposite directions or values. Use positive and negative numbers (including fractions and decimals) to represent quantities in real-world contexts, explaining the meaning of zero in each situation.

Suggested Lesson

Visit a wetland. Students use equipment to measure the positive and negative elevation changes within the wetland area. See Field Studies: Slope Survey for more details. 

Science

Kindergarten

Life Science K.LS.1.1

Use observations to describe how plants and animals are alike and different in terms of how they live and grow.

Supporting Content

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. All living things need water.

Earth and Space Science K.ESS.1.2

With guidance and support, use evidence to construct an explanation of how plants and animals interact with their environment to meet their needs.

Supporting Content

Plants and animals can change their environment.

Earth and Space Science K.ESS.2.1

Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants and animals and the places they live.

Supporting Content

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.

Earth and Space Science K.ESS.2.3

Communicate ideas that would enable humans to interact in a beneficial way with the land, water, air, and/or other living things in the local environment.

Supporting Content

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things. Examples could include keeping plastic trash out of waterways. 

Second Grade

Life Science 2.LS.1.1

Plan and conduct an investigation to determine the impact of light and water on the growth of plants.

Supporting Content

Plants depend on water and light to grow.

Life Science 2.LS.2.1

Make observations of plants and animals to compare the diversity of life in different habitats.

Supporting Content

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.

Earth and Space Science 2.ESS.2.1

Compare multiple solutions designed to slow or prevent wind or water from changing the shape of the land.

Supporting Content

Water can change the shape of the land.  Examples of solutions could include different designs of dikes to hold back water, and different designs for using shrubs, grass, and trees to hold back the land.

Earth and Space Science 2.ESS.2.3

Obtain information to identify where water is found on Earth and that it can be solid or liquid.

Supporting Content

Water is found in the ocean, rivers, lakes, and ponds. 

Third Grade

Life Science 3.LS.1.1

Develop models to demonstrate that living things, although they have unique and diverse life cycles, all have birth, growth, reproduction, and death in common.

Supporting Content

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.

Life Science 3.LS.3.2

Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment.

Supporting Content

Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment. Characteristics result from individuals’ interactions with the environment. The environment affects the traits that an organism develops. Examples of the environment affecting a trait could include that normally tall plants grown with insufficient water are stunted.

Life Science 3.LS.3.3

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.

Supporting Content

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.

Fourth Grade

Earth and Space Science 4.ESS.2.1

Make observations and/or measurements to provide evidence of the effects of weathering or the rate of erosion by water, ice, wind, or vegetation.

Supporting Content

Rainfall helps to shape the land and affects the types of living things found in a region. Water, ice, wind, living organisms, and gravity break rocks, soils, and sediments into smaller particles and move them around. Living things also affect the physical characteristics of their regions. Examples could include a beaver constructing a dam to create a pond.  Examples of variables to test could include angle of slope in the downhill movement of water and volume of water flow.

Earth and Space Science 4.ESS.3.1

Obtain and combine information to describe that energy and fuels are derived from natural resources and their uses affect the environment.

Supporting Content

Energy and fuels that humans use are derived from natural sources, and their use affects the environment in multiple ways. Examples of renewable energy resources could include water behind dams. Examples of environmental effects could include loss of habitat.

Fifth Grade

Life Science 5.LS.2.3

Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals living there may change.

Supporting Content

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

Life Science 5.LS.2.4

Develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment.

Supporting Content

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. Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Some organisms, such as fungi and bacteria, break down dead organisms (both plants and animals) and therefore operate as “decomposers.” Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. Matter cycles between the air and soil, and among plants, animals, and microbes as these organisms live and die. Organisms obtain gases and water, from the environment, and release waste matter (gas, liquid, or solid) back into the environment. Newly introduced species can damage the balance of an ecosystem. 

Earth and Space Science 5.ESS.2.2

Describe and graph the relative amounts of fresh and salt water in various reservoirs, to interpret and analyze the distribution of water on Earth.

Supporting Content

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. 

Earth and Space Science 5.ESS.3.1

Obtain and combine information about ways communities protect Earth's resources and environment using scientific ideas.

Supporting Content

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.

Sixth Grade - Middle School

Life Science MS.LS.1.5

Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for the role of photosynthesis in the cycling of matter and flow of energy into and out of organisms.

Supporting Content

Plants, algae (including phytoplankton), and many microorganisms use the energy from light to make sugars (food) from carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water through the process of photosynthesis, which also releases oxygen.

Life Science MS.LS.2.1

Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.

Supporting Content

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.

Life Science MS.LS.2.2

Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.

Supporting Content

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, both living and nonliving, are shared.

Life Science MS.LS.2.3

Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.

Supporting Content

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.

Life Science MS.LS.2.5

Construct an argument supported by evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.

Supporting Content

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.

Life Science MS.LS.2.6

Design and evaluate solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Supporting Content

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, such as food, energy, and medicines, as well as ecosystem services that humans rely on—for example, water purification. There are systematic processes for evaluating solutions with respect to how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a problem. Examples of ecosystem services could include water purification, nutrient recycling, and prevention of soil erosion. Examples of design solution constraints could include scientific, economic, and social considerations.

Earth and Space Science MS.ESS.2.4

Develop a model to describe the cycling of water through Earth’s systems driven by energy from the Sun and the force of gravity.

Supporting Content

Water continually cycles among land, ocean, and atmosphere via transpiration, evaporation, condensation, crystallization, percolation, and precipitation, as well as downhill flows on land. Movements of water and its changes in form are propelled by sunlight and gravity. Emphasis is on the ways water changes its state as it moves through the multiple pathways of the hydrologic cycle. 

Earth and Space Science MS.ESS.3.1

Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for how Earth’s mineral, energy, and groundwater resources are unevenly distributed as a result of past and current geologic processes.

Supporting Content

Humans depend on Earth’s land, ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere for many different resources. Minerals, fresh water, and biosphere resources are limited, and many are not renewable or replaceable over human lifetimes.

Earth and Space Science MS.ESS.3.3

Apply scientific practices to design a method for monitoring human activity and increasing beneficial human influences on the environment.

Supporting Content

Human activities can positively and negatively influence the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and ecosystems. Technology and engineering can potentially help us manage natural resources. 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).