Students use their senses to investigate changes in the seasons by making observations in nature. They collect data by drawing, writing, and or labeling their observations to compare how sunlight affects themselves and objects as the seasons change.
K-PS3-1 Make observations to determine the effect of sunlight on Earth’s surface. Clarification Statement: Examples of Earth’s surface could include sand, soil, rocks, and water Assessment Boundary: Assessment of temperature is limited to relative measures such as warmer/cooler.
This resource is explicitly designed to build towards this performance expectation.
Comments about Including the Performance Expectation During a school year students are going outside to make observations about how the sun affects objects, themselves, and causes seasonal changes on Earth. They draw pictures, write about, and label their observations to collect data. They will go out several times during the year to make observations. At the end of the year students could make a booklet to take home and share with their family using the pages completed during each observation.
This resource is explicitly designed to build towards this science and engineering practice.
Comments about Including the Science and Engineering Practice Students share their pictures, drawings, and writing with other classmates and the teacher each time they go outside to make observations. The teacher could guide the discussions about the data to include how they feel when they are in the sun or the shade during each observation (cold, cool, hot, warm) and why they feel that way.
This resource appears to be designed to build towards this disciplinary core idea, though the resource developer has not explicitly stated so.
Comments about Including the Disciplinary Core Idea The students make observations using their senses about how they feel when they are directly in the sun or in the shade. They are also using objects to explore how they feel when in the sun or shade. The correlation between how they or the objects feel in sun or shade in relation to the sun warming Earth's surface may need to be explained to students if they do not make that connection on their own.
This resource appears to be designed to build towards this crosscutting concept, though the resource developer has not explicitly stated so.
Comments about Including the Crosscutting Concept After making several observations during the school year, students will have data to compare how objects or themselves felt when they were in the sun or shade. This should lead to showing a pattern that more sun will make them warmer than less sun. Have each student do an entry in their science journals to discuss and show understanding about this concept.