In this unit, students focus on Earth’s interacting systems, evaluating how the hydrosphere and geosphere are shaped by one another. In this lesson, they analyze how people use dams to harness the energy in water, and how dams impact the environment. This page highlights each element of this lesson.
In the last unit, students learned about matter as they explored Earth’s position in the solar system. In this unit, students discuss how the sun provides light and heat to Earth, powering the water cycle, which in turn influences weather and climate. Students analyze the science phenomena of weather patterns in specific regions during a particular season.
In this unit, students discover how the sun provides light and heat to Earth and how the water cycle influences weather and climate. Students analyze weather patterns in specific regions during a particular season. They then use that knowledge to study the effects of extreme weather on humans, evaluating solutions to protect against those effects.
In this lesson, students evaluate the science phenomena of how organisms are affected when the environment changes. Students carry out an experiment to analyze two possible solutions that could be used to help a population of harpy eagles recover from the impacts of deforestation over time. This is a high-level extract of this lesson.
In this unit, students explore how living things depend on their environment and one another for survival. In this lesson, students discover phenomena surrounding how frogs have different internal and external structures throughout their life cycle that enable them to survive in their environments. This page highlights components of this lesson.
In this unit, students focus on interactions between matter and energy. In this lesson, students figure out the endothermic and exothermic phenomenon of chemical hot and cold packs to analyze matter and energy in different kinds of chemical reactions. This page is a high-level extract of this lesson.
In this unit, students explore the natural processes that cause Earth’s surface to change over time, analyzing how energy causes Earth’s matter to transform and cycle from one form to another. In this lesson, they trace phenomena of how energy is transferred in chemical reactions, which allows scientists to produce ethanol to use as an alternative energy source. This page showcases each component of this lesson.
In this unit, students explore the relationship between matter and energy using the phenomenon of material properties to discover why certain materials are useful for a particular function. For this lesson, they focus on the role of energy in changing matter during a chemical reaction phenomena between two substances. This page is a high-level extract of this lesson.
In this unit, students analyze the phenomenon of our sun as the primary source of energy on Earth. In this lesson, students explore how the sun’s uneven heating of the planet drives weather phenomena and climate phenomena, which result from complex interactions within Earth’s systems. This page is an extract from parts of this lesson.
In this unit, students explore science phenomena of the life forms that live on Earth, analyzing the cellular structures that make up complex organisms and figuring out how different groups of cells work together to keep the organism functioning properly. This page shows extracts from each part of this lesson.
In this unit, students figure out connections between genes and heredity to evolution, focusing on figuring out the phenomena of how both genetic information and the environment influence how a population develops over time. Students investigate different kinds of evidence for life’s shared ancestry and then experiment with how adaptations help some organisms survive. Students end with an investigation into artificial selection.
Standards citation: NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Neither WestEd nor the lead states and partners that developed the Next Generation Science Standards were involved in the production of this product, and do not endorse it.