Science (Grade 3)

Students who demonstrate understanding can:

1. Motion and Stability: Forces and Interactions
   1. Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of the effects of balanced and unbalanced forces on the motion of an object.
   2. Make observations and/or measurements of an object’s motion to provide evidence that a pattern can be used to predict future motion.
   3. Ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other.
   4. Define a simple design problem that can be solved by applying scientific ideas about magnets.
2. From Molecules to Organisms: Structures and Processes
   1. Develop models to describe that organisms have unique and diverse life cycles but all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death. Changes organisms go through during their life form a pattern.
3. Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics
   1. Construct an argument that some animals form groups that help members survive.
4. Heredity: Inheritance and Variation of Traits
   1. Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence that plants and animals have traits inherited from parents and that variation of these traits exists in a group of similar organisms. Patterns are the similarities and differences in traits shared between offspring and their parents, or among siblings.
   2. Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment.
5. Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
   1. Analyze and interpret data from fossils to provide evidence of the organisms and the environments in which they lived long ago.
   2. Use evidence to construct an explanation for how the variations in characteristics among individuals of the same species may provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.
   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.
   4. Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.
6. Earth’s Systems
   1. Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.
   2. Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world.
7. Earth and Human Activity
   1. Make a claim about the merit of a design solution that reduces the impacts of a weather-related hazard.