Science Grade 3
Scope and Sequence:
SCIENCE
THIRD GRADE Updated 2021
**Elem Science in NHPS uses kits that rotate among schools.
Check with each school for Rotation Details.
Science
Concepts
- Develop and explain multiple models of organisms’ life cycles: including birth, growth, reproduction, death.
- Analyze and interpret data and evidence how organisms inherit traits from parents and how variation in those traits may influence their survival.
- Construct an argument based on evidence from the past about how factors, such as climate, may affect how organisms survive.
- Build and test a solution designed to keep an animal safe when the environment changes.
- Collect and analyze detailed numerical data about weather conditions of the past and present to predict and forecast patterns and events.
- Analyze climates around the world, and factors influencing climate changes, and use data to predict future events.
- Investigate how unbalanced and balanced contact forces affect the patterns of motion in objects, including repeating motion, such as pendulums.
- Use evidence of non-contact forces affecting motion (such as magnetism) to build a device that solves a motion problem
Skills
- Make observations about demonstrations, experiments and phenomena.
- Form questions and wonderings about phenomena using observations and prior knowledge.
- Ask questions about others’ explanations.
- Use appropriate tools to make measurements and collect numerical data.
- Plan and conduct cause/effect investigations that are “fair tests”.
- Explain safety and ethical impacts of science investigations and solutions.
- Design and refine visual or physical models that explain science events.
- Display data using visual representations, including tables and graphs.
- Connect data to appropriate explanations.
- Construct and defend explanations about science concepts based on evidence.
- Communicate with others about science claims and flaws in reasoning based on evidence
- Use appropriate science vocabulary when communicating about science events.
- Relate the use of science and technology to both causes of societal problems and possible solutions.
- Design multiple solutions to real-life problems, and be able to improve them based on results.
Science How You Can Help Your Child
- Visit together, observe together, wonder together, think together, tinker together and most importantly, talk together!
- Be positive about science learning. Don’t ever say science (or math) is “hard”!
- Encourage perseverance. Often in science/math there is not an answer immediately, it takes time and effort.
- Be positive about your child being curious about the world and taking time to “figure things out” by predicting, talking, investigating, not just “learn about” by looking up an answer.
- Encourage students to develop and test their own understandings and explanations of the world.
- Encourage exploration of objects around the house (movement, light, sound, heat), the world outside (sky, weather, trees, yard, the earth), living things (humans, animals, plants) and technology (cars, TVs, machines).
- Encourage use of measurement tools at home (hand lens, rulers, thermometers, scales).
- Encourage use of math, especially statistics in solving problems and analyzing data.
- Help your child investigate the wide variety of careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
- Use and visit local resources (museums, parks, family nights, science programs/events at Yale, other places).
DETAILED GRADE BY GRADE OVERVIEW WITH NextGenerationScience Standards per Grade/Course and Quarter