Most children are natural scientists—they enjoy exploring, asking questions, playing with new objects, experimenting with different senses, observing, or using inventions to solve problems. In first grade, science teaching builds upon this innate curiosity by providing students the time, skills, and structures to formulate and investigate their questions.
First Grade students are expected to learn both the content and process of science. Our program reflects a balanced, comprehensive approach that includes the teaching of investigation and experimentation skills along with direct instruction. Bacich follows the curriculum as outlined in the California Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
1st Grade Units
Patterns in the Sky
Marshland Project Based Learning
Light and Sound Waves
The performance expectations in first grade help students formulate answers to questions such as: “What happens when materials vibrate? What happens when there is no light? What are some ways plants and animals meet their needs so that they can survive and grow? How are parents and their offspring similar and different? What objects are in the sky and how do they seem to move?”
Students are expected to develop understanding of the relationship between sound and vibrating materials as well as between the availability of light and ability to see objects. The idea that light travels from place to place can be understood by students at this level through determining the effect of placing objects made with different materials in the path of a beam of light. Students are also expected to develop understanding of how plants and animals use their external parts to help them survive, grow, and meet their needs as well as how behaviors of parents and offspring help the offspring survive. The understanding is developed that young plants and animals are like, but not exactly the same as, their parents. Students are able to observe, describe, and predict some patterns of the movement of objects in the sky.
The crosscutting concepts of patterns; cause and effect; structure and function; and influence of engineering, technology, and science on society and the natural world are called out as organizing concepts for these disciplinary core ideas. In the first grade performance expectations, students are expected to demonstrate grade-appropriate proficiency in planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations and designing solutions, and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information. Students are expected to use these practices to demonstrate understanding of the core ideas.
-excerpt from the NGSS DCI Arrangement of Standards document