Module Description & Pacing Guide

This module provides grade 3 students with experiences around physical sciences core ideas dealing with forces and interactions, matter and its interactions, and with engineering design. The anchor phenomenon for the first three investigations is motion. Magnetism and gravity are the phenomena investigated as students look for patterns of motion to predict future motion. The driving question is what causes objects to move?

Students work with magnets and paper clips, wheel-and-axle systems, paper air twirlers, and rotating tops. Students use their knowledge of science to enter the engineering design process and through the process refine their science understanding. In the fourth investigation, students move from energy to matter. They build on the science concepts of matter and its interactions developed in grade 2 using new tools to quantify observations. Students use metric tools to produce data on mass and volume to serve as the basis for evidence for an explanation of the phenomena of conservation of mass. The guiding question is how can we use tools to measure the mass of materials in mixtures?

Throughout the Motion and Matter Module, students engage in science and engineering practices to collect data to answer questions, and to define problems in order to develop solutions. Students reflect on their own use of these practices and find out about how others use these practices in science and engineering careers.