Contents:
Kit Overview
National/State Standards Compliance
Lesson Breakdown
Links
Near Real Time Data

Kit Overview

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National/State Standards Compliance

Many of the extension lessons on these pages tie in strongly with the K-4 National Science Standards. Among the strongest ties are the earth and space and life science items. These items deal with the water cycle and photosynthesis. The strength of coverage of these items will heavily depend on the students' prior understanding and/or the teacher's ability to supplement additional materials to ensure students have mastered the concepts regarding the water cycle and photosynthesis.

The FOSS kit even without these pages directly address many standards from the science as inquiry and physical science sections. In many cases the supplemental exercises strongly bolster that coverage of the standards.

National Science Standards (5-8) that are met include:

• Science as Inquiry: generate questions; design and conduct scientific investigations to answer those questions.
• Science as Inquiry: employ tools to gather, analyze, and interpret data.
• Science as Inquiry: use data to construct reasonable explanations
• Science as Inquiry: develop and communicate explanations using evidence.
• Science as Inquiry: analyze alternate explanations and prediction
• Science as Inquiry: understand that scientists use different kinds of investigations and tools to develop explanations using evidence and knowledge.
• Physical Science: substances have characteristic properties, such as solubility.
• Physical Science: substances react chemically in characteristic ways with other substances to form new substances.
• Physical Science: more than 100 known elements combine in a multitude of ways to produce compounds, which account for the living and nonliving substances in our world.
• Science and Technology: Scientists work collaboratively in teams and use tools and scientific techniques to make better observations.
• History of Science: science and technology have been practice by people for a long time.

• Physical Science: light interacts with matter by transmission, absorption, or scattering.
• Physical Science: the sun is a major source of energy for changes in the earth's surface. The sun loses energy by emitting light. A tiny fraction of that light reaches the earth, transferring energy from the sun to the earth.
• Life Sciences: for ecosystems the major source of energy is sunlight. Energy entering ecosystems as sunlight is transferred by producers into chemical energy through photosynthesis. That energy then passes from organism to organism tin food webs.
• Earth and Space Science: water, which covers the majority of the earth, circulates through the crust, oceans, and atmosphere in waht is known as the "water cycle."
• Earth and Space Science: water is a solvent. As it passes through the water cycle it dissolves minerals and gases and carries them to the oceans.
• Earth and Space Science: the sun is the major source of energy for phenomena on the earth's surface, such as growth of plants, winds, ocean currents, and the water cycle.

California Science Standards

Grade 5:

• Physical Sciences: during chemical reactions, the atoms in the reactants rearrange to form products with different properties.
• Physical Sciences: all matter is made of atoms, which may combine to form molecules.
• Physical Sciences: metals have properties in common, such as electrical and thermal conductivity.
• Physical Sciences: each element is made of one kind of atom. These elements are organized in the Periodic Table by their chemical properties.
• Physical Sciences: differences in chemical and physical properties of substances are used to separate and identify compounds and mixtures.
• Physical Sciences: properties of solid, liquid, and gaseous substances, such as sugar, water, helium, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.
• Physical Sciences: living organisms and most materials are composed of just a few elements.
• Physical Sciences: common properties of salts, such as sodium chloride.
• Earth Science: the Earth's atmosphere exerts a pressure that decreases with distance above the Earth's surface, and is the same in all directions.
• Investigation and Experimentation: classify objects based on appropriate criteria.
• Investigation and Experimentation: select appropriate tools and make quantitative observations.
• Investigation and Experimentation: record data using appropriate graphical representation, and identify inferences based on those data.

• Physical Sciences: scientists have developed instruments that can create images of (maybe)...
• Life Sciences: students know plants use carbon dioxide and energy from sunlight to build molecules of sugar and release oxygen.
• Earth Science: water on earth moves between the oceans and land through the processes of evaporation and condensation.
• Earth Science: students know when liquid water evaporates, it turns into water vapor in the air and can reappear as a liquid when cooled or as a solid if cooled below the freezing point of water.
• Earth Science: students know water vapor in the air moves from one place to another and can form fog or clouds, which are tiny droplets of water or ice, and can fall to the Earth as rain , hail, sleet, or snow.
• Investigation and Experimentation: draw conclusions from scientific evidence and indicate whether further information is needed to support a a specific conclusion.
• Investigation and Experimentation: write a report of an investigation that includes conducted tests, collected data or examining evidence and drawing conclusions.

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Lesson Breakdown

* Extensions and supplements for this kit are not closely tied to the development of understanding of the core kit concepts and thus teachers are encouraged to utilize their discretion as for optimizing the time at which these web extensions are introduced.

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Links

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Near Real Time Data

The instruments at the remote sites collect data on numerous environmental variables. Only some of these variables are directly and clearly relevant to students using the FOSS Mixtures and Solutions kit. Other variables are provided so that the interested instructor can access variables that may be less relevant. Below is a matrix providing information on the variables that can be investigated by your students.

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