Student groups observe and investigate worms and develop models of their specific structures that help them to move in their environment. They start by observing real worms and how they move. Students are presented with the driving question, “How is a worm like a first grader?” Groups consider other animals that move in the air, land, and water, including people. By engaging in investigations and developing scientific models, they develop plans for an imaginary animal with specified structures for moving around. At the end of the unit, students integrate all they have learned about structures, and use recycled materials to create and present their animals and their animals’ babies, which either have similar structures as the parent, or need help from the parent to get around. 

• Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of animals meeting needs through specified structures.

• Make observations of patterns to construct explanations of how some animals rely on care to grow.

This unit has a creativity and critical thinking focus:

• Propose, model, name, and creatively design an imaginary animal (from recycled materials) that uses a special structure to move around.

• Reflect on traits that offspring might have as similar or different from the parent, and creatively design the offspring out of recycled materials.

Resources

• Household recycled items for building animals (food containers, boxes, fasteners, etc.), and other household and art materials (yarn, paper, cardboard, string, paperclips, etc.)

• Chart paper

• Materials (pens, sticky notes, etc.) to enable students to post questions and ideas to the Driving Question Board.

      Opportunities to adapt, extend, and enrich

• This mini-unit is based on portions of three learning sets in a sequence of five learning sets. Remaining learning sets have students make a puppet show about how animals take care of and teach their young.

• The full unit and additional STEM project-learning units and related resources can be found at https://mlpbl.open3d.science/

English Version

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Waet84f2z8ilVsowsQUbzOvRU0XY3xoHh6qKW99-hPo/edit?usp=sharing

Hindi Version

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tAAyAuz3tQw9kHuSo1v7tBB_bGPaJK-XTnGXQPpFtmQ/edit?usp=sharing

Gujarati Version

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/11MovTzoQqwt9R-CI6flAlrBWi-SKe_7bzvfO2Z5y40o/edit?usp=sharing

Kannada Version

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rL3uitVtOHOZEPGXHCLzLaY_5ypIEzXAXnR6w6Jdjhg/edit?usp=drive_link