Maine Learning Results 5th Grade Science Activities

ME.A. Unifying Themes: Students apply the principles of systems, models, constancy and change, and scale in science and technology.

A.1. Systems: Students explain interactions between parts that make up whole man-made and natural things.

A.1.a. Give examples that show how individual parts of organisms, ecosystems, or man-made structures can influence one another.

A.2. Models: Students use models to represent objects, processes, and events from the physical setting, the living environment, and the technological world.

A.2.a. Represent the features of a real object, event, or process using models including geometric figures, number sequences, graphs, diagrams, sketches, maps, or three-dimensional figures and note ways in which those representations do (and do not) match features of the originals.

A.3. Constancy and Change: Students identify and represent basic patterns of change in the physical setting, the living environment, and the technological world.

A.3.b. Make tables or graphs to represent changes.

A.4. Scale: Students use mathematics to describe scale for man-made and natural things.

A.4.a. Measure things to compare sizes, speeds, times, distances, and weights.

ME.B. The Skills and Traits of Scientific Inquiry and Technological Design: Students plan, conduct, analyze data from and communicate results of in-depth scientific investigations; and they use a systematic process, tools, equipment, and a variety of materials to create a technological design and produce a solution or product to meet a specified need.

B.1. Skills and Traits of Scientific Inquiry: Students plan, conduct, analyze data from, and communicate results of investigations, including fair tests.

B.1.b. Plan and safely conduct investigations including simple experiments that involve a fair test.

B.1.c. Use simple equipment, tools, and appropriate metric units of measurement to gather data and extend the senses.

B.1.d. Use data to construct and support a reasonable explanation.

ME.C. The Scientific and Technological Enterprise: Students understand the history and nature of scientific knowledge and technology, the processes of inquiry and technological design, and the impacts science and technology have on society and the environment.

C.1. Understandings of Inquiry: Students describe how scientific investigations result in explanations that are communicated to other scientists.

C.1.a. Describe how scientists answer questions by developing explanations based on observations, evidence, and knowledge of the natural world.

C.2. Understandings about Science and Technology: Students describe why people use science and technology and how scientists and engineers work.

C.2.a. Describe how scientists seek to answer questions and explain the natural world.

C.3. Science, Technology, and Society: Students identify and describe the influences of science and technology on people and the environment.

C.3.b. Give examples of changes in the environment caused by natural or man-made influences.

C.3.c. Explain that natural resources are limited, and that reusing, recycling, and reducing materials and using renewable resources is important.

ME.D. The Physical Setting: Students understand the universal nature of matter, energy, force, and motion and identify how these relationships are exhibited in Earth Systems, in the solar system, and throughout the universe.

D.1. Universe and Solar System: Students describe the positions and apparent motions of different objects in and beyond our solar system and how these objects can be viewed from Earth.

D.1.a. Show the locations of the sun, Earth, moon, and planets and their orbits.

D.1.b. Observe and report on observations that the sun appears to move across the sky in the same way every day, but its path changes slowly over the seasons.

D.1.c. Recognize that the sun is a star and is similar to other stars in the universe.

D.2. Earth: Students describe the properties of Earth's surface materials, the processes that change them, and cycles that affect the Earth.

D.2.a. Explain the effects of the rotation of Earth on the day/night cycle, and how that cycle affects local temperature.

D.2.b. Describe the various forms water takes in the air and how that relates to weather.

D.2.d. Describe the kinds of materials that form rocks and soil.

D.2.f. Explain how the substance called air surrounds things, takes up space, and its movement can be felt as wind.

D.3. Matter and Energy: Students describe properties of objects and materials before and after they undergo a change or interaction.

D.3.a. Describe how the weight of an object compares to the sum of the weight of its parts.

D.3.b. Illustrate how many different substances can be made from a small number of basic ingredients.

D.3.c. Describe properties of original materials, and the new material(s) formed, to demonstrate that a change has occurred.

D.3.d. Describe what happens to the temperatures of objects when a warmer object is near a cooler object.

D.3.e. Describe how the heating and cooling of water and other materials can change the properties of the materials.

D.3.g. Explain that materials can be composed of parts too small to be seen without magnification.

D.4. Force and Motion: Students summarize how various forces affect the motion of objects.

D.4.a. Predict the effect of a given force on the motion of an object.

D.4.b. Describe how fast things move by how long it takes them to go a certain distance.

D.4.d. Give examples of how gravity, magnets, and electrically charged materials push and pull objects.

ME.E. The Living Environment: Students understand that cells are the basic unit of life, that all life as we know it has evolved through genetic transfer and natural selection to create a great diversity of organisms, and that these organisms create interdependent webs through which matter and energy flow. Students understand similarities and differences between humans and other organisms and the interconnections of these interdependent webs.

E.1. Biodiversity: Students compare living things based on their behaviors, external features, and environmental needs.

E.1.a. Describe how living things can be sorted in many ways, depending on which features or behaviors are used to sort them, and apply this understanding to sort living things.

E.1.b. Describe the changes in external features and behaviors of an organism during its life cycle.

E.2. Ecosystems: Students describe ways organisms depend upon, interact within, and change the living and non-living environment as well as ways the environment affects organisms.

E.2.a. Explain how changes in an organism's habitat can influence its survival.

E.2.b. Describe that organisms all over the Earth are living, dying, and decaying and new organisms are being produced by the old ones.

E.2.c. Describe some of the ways in which organisms depend on one another, including animals carrying pollen and dispersing seeds.

E.2.d. Explain how the food of most animals can be traced back to plants and how animals use food for energy and repair.

E.2.e. Explain how organisms can affect the environment in different ways.

E.3. Cells: Students describe how living things are made up of one or more cells and the ways cells help organisms meet their basic needs.

E.3.a. Give examples of organisms that consist of a single cell and organisms that are made of a collection of cells.

E.5. Evolution: Students describe the fossil evidence and present explanations that help us understand why there are differences among and between present and past organisms.

E.5.b. Compare fossils to one another and to living organisms according to their similarities and differences.