Bedford School District

Curriculum Map  Last Updated On 6/2018

Grade 3

SCIENCE

Course Standards/ Essential Understandings by Unit

• Thinking Like a Scientist:  Bats!

• Understanding a problem
• Look at bat population data in Bedford
• Predict current populations
• Collect population data and contribute to a larger pool of data collected across the town of Bedford
• Analyze data about the Bedford bat population

• Animal Adaptations (study of animals in their adaptations for survival in their biomes; their roles; technology projects that communicate student learning)

1. Animals (such as the bat) play important roles in the continuing health of the earth’s environment.
2. Living things are adapted in many ways for survival in their biomes.
3. Ecological diversity is important to the ecosystem.
4. Matter is the “stuff” of which all living and nonliving things are made, and goes through changes depending upon physical conditions.
5. The Earth provides the proper set of conditions for life.
6. Human beings affect and can change conditions on Earth.

• Forces and Interactions:  Students will be able to:

• Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of the effects of balanced and unbalanced forces on the motion of an object.
• Make observations and/or measurements of an object’s motion to provide evidence that a pattern can be used to predict future motion.
• Ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other.
• Define a simple design problem that can be solved by applying scientific ideas about magnets.

• Inheritance and Traits:  Students will be able to:

• Develop models to describe that organisms have unique and diverse life cycles but all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death.
• 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.
• Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment.
• 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.