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Grade K. Living Things and Their Needs provides students the opportunity to investigate and observe what plants and animals need to survive. Lessons are structured in 30-minute class sessions, making it easy to fit science into your day. The Living Things and Their Needs 1-Use Unit Kit includes a teacher's guide, a license to access online digital resources, and enough supplies and apparatus to teach the unit once to a class of up to 24 students.

Grade K. In 4 lessons spanning 14 class sessions, the Building Blocks of Science® 3D unit Living Things and Their Needs provides students the opportunity to investigate and observe what plants and animals need to survive. Building Blocks of Science® 3D lessons are structured in 30-minute class sessions, making it easy to fit science into your day. The Living Things and Their Needs 1-Use Unit Kit includes a teacher's guide (item #515642), a license for teacher and students to access online digital resources, and enough supplies and apparatus to teach the unit once to a class of up to 24 students. Kit also includes a voucher for prepaid delivery of the living organisms.

Along with hands-on learning, this Building Blocks of Science® 3D unit also provides digital resources to enhance the classroom experience. These components offer an additional method of delivering content, particularly for classrooms with consistent access to computers or tablets. Digital components include digital teacher's guide, simulations, digital literacy reader, interactive whiteboard activities, interactive student investigation sheets, and assessment. All digital resources for Building Blocks of Science® 3D are accessible at CarolinaScienceOnline.com.

Unit Summary
In a series of hands-on lessons, students identify living and nonliving things. They begin to focus on two types of living thing by planting pumpkin seeds and making predictions about their growth and by examining bessbugs in a classroom habitat. By studying these two organisms, students come to understand what living things need to survive. Students collect data about the development of their pumpkin plants by measuring their height and counting the number of leaves each day. Pumpkin plants are grown in different conditions (i.e., without soil, without sunlight, and without water), and students compare how these plants grow to how a control plant develops. To explore preferences, students set up choice chambers for the bessbugs, observe their behaviors, and draw conclusions about the habitats that bessbugs prefer. "Environment" is defined as the living and nonliving things in a certain area. Students examine different environments using photo cards and think about the ways that living things can change their environment. A nature walk encourages students to make connections between what they are learning and their local environment; students observe the ways living things have affected the local environment. Human impact becomes a focus as students consider the positive and negative ways that humans change the environment. Working in pairs, students develop a solution to help protect the environment and share their idea with the class.

Next Generation Science Standards*
The Building Blocks of Science® 3D unit Living Things and Their Needs (©2019) integrates process skills as defined by the Next Generation Science Standards.

Performance Expectations

• K-LS1-1: Use observations to describe patterns of what plants and animals (including humans) need to survive.
• K-ESS2-2: Construct an argument supported by evidence for how plants and animals (including humans) can change the environment to meet their needs.
• K-ESS3-1: Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants or animals (including humans) and the places they live.
• K-ESS3-3: Communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on the land, water, air, and/or living things in the local environment.
• K-2-ETS1-2: Develop a simple sketch, drawing, or physical model to illustrate how the shape of an object helps it function as needed to solve a given problem.

Disciplinary Core Ideas

• LS1.C: Organization for Matter and Energy Flow in Organisms
• ESS2.E: Biogeology
• ESS3.A: Natural Resources
• ESS3.C: Human Impacts on Earth Systems
• ETS1.B: Developing Possible Solutions

Crosscutting Concepts

• Patterns
• Cause and Effect
• Systems and System Models

Common Core State Standards
Language Arts

• SL.K.2: Comprehension and Collaboration
• SL.K.5: Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas
• W.K.2: Text Type and Purpose
• W.K.8: Research to Build and Present Knowledge

Mathematics

• K.MD.A.1: Describe and compare measurable attributes

Lesson Summaries
Lesson 1
As a pre-unit assessment, students classify objects as living and nonliving. They then discuss similarities among all living things and identify what living things need to survive and grow. Students discuss the needs of plants, and they plant a pumpkin seed. Bessbugs are introduced as an animal, specifically an insect. Students observe the bessbugs in a prepared habitat and have the opportunity to interact with them.
Lesson 2
In this lesson, students examine the needs of living things. First, students think about what plants need to survive. They set up an experiment to explore three variables: light, soil, and water. Students then consider the preferences of bessbugs by observing them in four different choice chambers. They apply their observations to identify the needs of bessbugs. Throughout this lesson, students continue to monitor the pumpkin seeds they planted in Lesson 1
. They measure the growth of the developing plant to obtain data, which will be examined later in the unit.
Lesson 3
In this lesson, students are introduced to the term "environment." They discover that an environment is a system made up of plants, animals, and their surroundings. Students begin by studying images and drawing conclusions about how living things changed their environment. A nature walk encourages students to examine their own surroundings and make connections to their impact on their local environment. Students also observe their pumpkin plants and collect more data to determine a pattern of growth.
Lesson 4
During this unit, students have explored living things, their needs, and how living things impact the environment to meet their needs. Using bessbugs and pumpkin plants as model organisms, students have learned that all living things grow and survive when they have access to all the things they need; however, a living thing can change its environment while trying to meet its needs. In this final lesson, students review what they've learned throughout the unit. They revisit and revise their responses to the two questions they were asked in Lesson 1: "What do all living things do?" and "What do living things need to live?" Students relate this understanding to their pumpkin plants and analyze the data they have collected about their plants to draw conclusions about how the plants have grown throughout the unit. Students also consider how humans change their local environment and how those changes can be both positive and negative. Students work in pairs to develop solutions that might help reduce the impact of humans on their local environment. They make posters to communicate these solutions to their classmates.

*Next Generation Science Standards® is a registered trademark of WestEd. 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.