by Liana Ponce
Three years ago I started writing lessons for the third grade science standards. My hope was to create lessons that were easy to implement both in time and materials. This work continues to make me a better teacher and coach to other teachers.
Over time issues of copyright and taxes convinced me to offer all my materials for free. For the last few months I’ve been working to repost all these materials with the correct settings and copyright information.
This Life Cycles and Traits unit was my first attempt at creating a whole unit of learning. It correlates to the Next Generation Science Standards 3.LS1.1, 3.LS3.1, and 3.LS3.2. Looking back on it now, I see lessons I already want to improve but for now you can find the unit for free by clicking on the link below.
The unit includes lessons for the following objectives:
Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism (4 lessons with resources).
Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles (3 lessons with resources).
Assessment 1 - 5 days long. Students will research an organism of their choice and either create a model of the animal's life cycle or write an essay to describe the life cycle.
Many characteristics of organisms are inherited from their parents (4 lessons with resources).
The environment also affects the traits that an organism develops (1 lesson with resources).
In each kind of organism there is variation in the traits themselves, and different kinds of organisms may have different versions of the trait (1 lesson with resources).
Assessment 2 - 3 days. Students will student apply their learning of traits in a study of a family of butterflies.
Math connections. There are 14 pages of math activities that relate to the science topics covered in this unit. The activities are on multiplication, division, and graphing.
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