Science
There are exciting units of interest going on in science classes this year. Here is a first snippet of what each grade is going to investigate.
Kindergarten- Pushes and Pulls
Directional forces (pushes and pulls) are evident everywhere in our world—from pushing a grocery cart to pulling a wagon. From an early age, children use trial and error to learn about the effects of pushing and pulling, and they come into kindergarten with this knowledge. This unit builds on students’ inherent knowledge, with the goal of advancing their understanding so that they can begin to anticipate and articulate how pushes and pulls impact the motion of a ball. Students’ increasing experience with and confidence in being able to predict and describe the effect of a specific type of push or pull will give rise to a growing understanding of forces and motion, as well as an expanded vocabulary and increased facility in describing both the causes and effects of forces on motion.
Grade 2- Changing Landforms:
Many people hold onto ideas about the stability of Earth and its features and materials, even after being taught otherwise, largely because the idea that wind and water can change rock is hard to believe. Students commonly think that rocks and sand have always existed in their present forms and that Earth’s landforms do not change. To help confront such preexisting notions, the Changing Landforms unit focuses on the idea that Earth’s materials and features—even materials as hard as rock—change due to erosion. The Disappearing Cliff unit, students use models to investigate how wind and water can cause changes to landforms. They learn that landforms made of solid rock undergo small-scale changes, and that over time, these changes add up to big changes.
Grade 3- Inheritance and Traits
How do organisms get their traits? This is an unspoken question that underlies things many of us wonder about beginning at an early age, such as Why does my sibling have curly hair whereas mine is straight? How come I am shorter than others in my family? Why is my sister a faster runner than I am? In the Inheritance and Traits: Variation in Wolves unit, students dive deep into exploring patterns in the traits of organisms to answer the question of how those traits come to be.
Grade 4- Vision and Light
Over the course of this unit, students investigate the role that animal senses, primarily vision, play in survival as they try to understand a realistic fictional problem with a real organism. They investigate why there is a decline in the number of Tokay geckos living in one area of a rain forest in the Philippines. Humans change the environments in which we live in many ways—clearing forests to make roads and build houses, removing species of plants and animals that are dangerous to humans, installing lights to make it easier to see at night, and so on. Often these changes affect other species’ survival in unanticipated ways. Examples of this are changes humans make to the environment that impact how animals in the same environment are able to use their senses to get information.
Grade 5
Patterns of Earth and Sky
In this unit, we’re going to take a closer look at the stars and use what we observe to help us solve a mystery.
Humans have been observing the Moon, the stars, and other objects in space and recording their observations since the Paleolithic Era. Records that demonstrate an attention to the observable patterns in space range from miniature to megalithic and can be carved or built from stone, crafted from clay or metal, or carved in bone. Observing and recording the apparent patterns of movement of the Moon, the sun, and other stars has allowed people to track and mark the passage of time for millennia. Archaeoastronomers investigate how ancient cultures viewed and understood astronomical phenomena and the role that astronomy played in society. In this unit, students take on the role of astronomers, helping a team of archaeologists at the fictional Museum of Archaeology. Students are asked to figure out and explain the significance of the illustrations on a recently discovered thousand-year-old artifact with a missing piece, the anchor phenomenon for the unit.