In this unit, students examine the problem of the declining monarch population on a smaller scale. Students assume the role of scientists helping a group of children from the fictional community of Mariposa Grove to explain why there are no more caterpillars in a community garden that was converted from a field which once had caterpillars; students also advise the children on what they can do to attract the monarchs. Students also examine the ways that humans change their environment in order to meet their needs and explore how people can choose to share the places they live with other living things.

In this unit, students take on the role of scientists advising an aquarium director by helping answer young visitors’ questions about Spruce the Sea Turtle, who will soon be released back into the ocean. They investigate how Spruce can survive in the ocean, particularly since sharks live in the area. They then investigate a question about Spruce’s offspring: How can Spruce the Sea Turtle’s offspring survive where there are sharks Students create multiple models throughout the unit to explain their ideas about how defenses function. By the end of the unit, students will be able to use ideas of structure and function to explain how a wide variety of animals and plants and their offspring defend themselves from being eaten.

In this unit, students dive deep into how plants depend on animals in their habitats. Students assume the role of plant scientists reporting to the lead scientist at the Bengal Tiger Reserve, who has tasked students with explaining the unit's anchor phenomenon of why no new chalta trees are growing there.

In the Balancing Forces unit, students work to investigate and then explain how inventions seem to defy logic. Over the course of the unit, through firsthand experiences, discourse, and reading and writing informational text, students will come to understand how forces can cause stability or change in an object’s motion. They will discover how magnetic force can be used to counterbalance the force of gravity. They will create physical models, diagram models, and write, and present scientific explanations detailing how the maglev (magnetic levitation) train appears to defy gravity by floating.

In the Energy Conversions unit, students take on the role of systems engineers for Ergstown, a fictional town that experiences frequent blackouts, the anchor phenomenon for the unit. Throughout the unit, they explore reasons why an electrical system may fail. Through firsthand experiences, discourse, reading, writing, and engaging with a digital simulation, students make discoveries about the way electrical systems work. Then, students apply what they have learned as they choose new energy sources and energy converters for the town, using evidence to explain why their choices will make the electrical system more reliable. As they work to solve the problem of blackouts in Ergstown, students will use and construct devices that convert energy from one form to another, build an understanding of the electrical system, and learn to identify energy forms all around them.

Humans have been observing the Moon, the stars, and other objects in space and recording their observations for many years. Observing and recording the apparent patterns of movement of the Moon, the sun, and other stars has allowed people to track and mark the passage of time for millennia. In this unit, students take on the role of astronomers, helping a team of archaeologists at the fictional Museum of Archaeology. Students are asked to figure out and explain the significance of the illustrations on a recently discovered thousand-year-old artifact with a missing piece, the anchor phenomenon for the unit. Students observe and investigate patterns in the sky by day and by night with kinesthetic models and informational text. They learn that stars are all around us in space, develop an understanding of scale and distance in the universe, and discover how the spin and orbit of our planet causes us to observe daily and yearly patterns of stars. Students apply their understanding of why we see different stars at different times to explain what is shown on the artifact, and what might be on the missing piece.

In the Inheritance and Traits: Variation in Wolves unit, students dive deep in exploring patterns in the traits of organisms to answer the question of how those traits come to be, and how they help the organism to adapt to their surroundings, thrive  and survive.  As wildlife biologists, students work to figure out how animals get their traits by exploring similarities and variation in the traits of many different organisms. 

Students investigate the role that animal senses, primarily vision, play in survival as they try to understand a realistic fictional problem with a real organism. They investigate why there is a decline in the number of Tokay geckos living in one area of a rain forest in the Philippines. Students engage in hands-on activities, reading, and discourse as they learn how animal eyes function, discovering that some animals see well in bright light and others see well in low light. Woven throughout the unit is a focus on the crosscutting concept of Structure and Function, as ell as Animal Adaptations.

In this unit, students take will engage in  various investigations, These investigations offer the opportunity for students to delve deeply into understanding the particulate nature of matter and to apply it to explain various phenomena.  Students will engage in hands-on experiences in which they will make  predictions, conduct experiments, and  record their observations  of what they think might be happening when different kinds of substances and particles are mixed.  The students will gather evidence to support their emerging understanding. By the end of the unit, students will understand that there is a connection between the observable properties of materials and the properties of the molecules of which those materials are composed.