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Grade 3. In 15 lessons, students examine variation of inherited traits in individuals, as well as how the environment can affect expression of individuals' traits. They also explore patterns of life cycles and how traits can provide organisms a reproductive advantage. Module includes a teacher guide, 10 student activity guides, 16 Smithsonian Science Stories student readers, and enough materials for 32 students to use 1 time.

Grade 3. Module Highlights: During the module's 15 lessons, students examine variation of inherited traits in individuals, as well as how the environment can affect expression of individuals' traits. Students also explore patterns of life cycles and how traits can provide organisms a reproductive advantage.

This module includes a teacher guide, 10 student activity guides, 16 Smithsonian Science Stories student readers, and enough materials for 32 students to use 1 time.

Student Readers Available HERE

Alignment to the Next Generation Science Standards*
Performance Expectations

• 3-LS1-1: Develop models to describe that organisms have unique and diverse life cycles, but all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death.
• 3-LS3-1: 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.
• 3-LS3-2: Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment.
• 3-LS4-2: 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-ESS2-2: Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world.

Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS3.A: Inheritance of Traits

• Many characteristics of organisms are inherited from their parents.
• Other characteristics result from individuals' interactions with the environment, which can range from diet to learning. Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment.

• Different organisms vary in how they look and function because they have different inherited information.
• The environment also affects the traits that an organism develops.

• Sometimes the differences in characteristics between individuals of the same species provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.

• Climate describes a range of an area's typical weather conditions and the extent to which those conditions vary over years.

Focal Science and Engineering Practices

• Analyzing and interpreting data
• Engaging in argument from evidence
• Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

Focal Crosscutting Concepts

• Cause and effect

Phenomena and Problems Storyline
Lesson Summaries
Lesson 1: Alike and Different
Students observe plants and record and identify patterns of similarities and differences in individual plant characteristics. They then use these patterns to construct questions about what causes differences in traits of individuals of the same species.
Lesson 2: Plants Have Parents Too
Students carry out an investigation to compare young Wisconsin Fast Plants® with their parents. Students analyze the data from the investigation and use the data as evidence to construct claims explaining a possible cause of differences and similarities between individual parent plants and their offspring's traits.
Lesson 3: Nature and Nurture
Students develop testable questions about the effect of environmental factors on plant characteristics and make predictions about the results of investigations testing the effect of the angle of light and amount of water that Fast Plants® receive.
Lesson 4: Fair Weather Fronds
Students analyze results of the "fair test" investigations set up in Lesson 3 and use them to construct explanations for Fast Plants® characteristics not explained by inheritance.
Lesson 5: Pen Pal Plants
Students record temperature data from the three locations using a text. Students collect data from the text to identify and describe a pattern of difference in temperature between Vermont and New York and then New York and Arizona, and they suggest a possible cause of the difference in sugar maple trait expression.
Lesson 6: Weather or Not
Students represent temperature and precipitation data for all three locations as pictographs, to reveal a pattern of similarities and differences in the climates of Albany, New York; Burlington, Vermont; and Tucson, Arizona, for the months of January, April, and July. Students use the data they have combined and compared to predict whether the sugar maple seedlings can live in Arizona.
Lesson 7: Comparing Climates
Students compare and combine temperature and precipitation data for multiple years and locations and use it as evidence to make a prediction about what will happen if a sugar maple seedling from Albany, New York, is planted in Tucson, Arizona, again.
Lesson 8: It's Alive
Students directly observe milkweed bug eggs and/or nymphs and develop initial models describing how the insects will change as they grow over time.
Lesson 9: Animal Stories
Students gather additional information about animal life cycles through a text and identify a pattern in life cycles found in animals included in the text. Students use direct observations of milkweed bugs to notice how they have changed since the previous lesson. They combine their observations with information from the text to use when revising their predictions about how the milkweed bugs will change over time.
Lesson 10: The Cycles of Life
Students play a game that serves as a hands-on activity that simulates the cycles of life, creating a physical model of animal life cycles. Students directly observe milkweed bugs and record how they have changed since the previous lesson. They use the model life cycle and their observations to complete a final prediction for how the milkweed bugs will continue to change over time.
Lesson 11: Snapdragon Science
Students discover through a slideshow that white snapdragons are outcompeting yellow ones in a meadow being studied at the Rocky Mountain Biological Institute. Students gather information about pollination. They use the text to practice developing testable questions about pollination and pollinators. The class then collaboratively develops a testable question that they could use to investigate the phenomenon of white snapdragons outcompeting yellow ones.
Lesson 12: Busy Bees
The class revisits the question they developed at the end of the previous lesson and uses a simulation to observe and record field data of bumblebees visiting flowers in the mountain meadow. Students use mathematics and computation to analyze and interpret data to recognize that the bumblebees visit the white flowers more frequently, giving them a reproductive advantage over the yellow flowers.
Lesson 13: Ah Snap!
Students combine information from text and data from the simulation to construct a revised explanation for why white-flowered snapdragons are outpopulating yellow-flowered ones.
Science Challenge
Lesson 14: Guppy Mystery Part 1
Students learn through text that male guppies in one stream have brighter spots than male guppies in another stream. Students analyze data from field notes about the environmental conditions in two streams and organize the data into a table to identify similarities and differences in both streams' water quality.
Lesson 15: Guppy Mystery Part 2
Students obtain and evaluate information about how animals can get pigments that give them specific colors from algae they eat in their environment. Students use evidence from the text, along with field notes from the streams, to evaluate claims about what causes brighter markings on guppies in Stream A.

*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.