1st Quarter

Focus Topic: Rocks and Minerals

Focus Skills:

• Understand properties of matter before and after they undergo change

• Compare physical properties of rocks

• Explain how to identify minerals

• Classify rocks as sedimentary, metamorphic or igneous

Strategies to Use at Home:

• Parents and child can start a rock collection and work together to identify and classify the rocks

• Gather a collection of texts about rocks and read them together

• Create your own rock book - with drawings or photos of rocks and captions to explain what their characteristics are

• Visit science museums to view and discuss their rock collections

2nd Quarter

1. Focus Topic: Food, Minerals, Vitamins and Exercise

Focus Skills:

• Understand food and benefits of minerals, vitamins and exercise

• Classify substances (food or non-food) based on their ability to provide energy, growth and repair

• Explain how minerals, vitamins and exercise help us to stay healthy

2. Focus Topic: Ecosystems

Focus Skills:

• Explain how animals survive changes in their habitats

• Give examples of habitat changes that are beneficial and changes that are harmful

• Explain how animals meet their needs by changing their behaviors in response to the environment

• Explain how humans respond and adapt to changes in their environment

• Explain how differences in the same animal population can lead to advantages in their habitat

Strategies to Use at Home:

• Work together for a week to plan your family's meals and to track how your meal plan keeps your family healthy

• Go grocery shopping together and check out the nutrition labels to learn more about vitamins and minerals in the foods you eat

• Parents and child create an exercise schedule and keep an exercise diary to record activity, time and changes in health

• Parents and child take a nature walk to observe animals in their natural habitats. Create an observation journal to record your findings.

3rd Quarter

1. Focus Topic: Earth's Changing History

Focus Skills:

• Understand the use of fossils and the changes in the earth's surface as evidence of the earth's history and changing lifeforms

• Compare fossils to each other and to living organisms

• Make inferences about the earth's early environment from the evidence found in fossils

• Give examples of how the earth changes due to slow processes (weathering, erosion) and rapid processes (landslides, volcanic eruptions)

2. Focus Topic: Earth's Patterns and Its Moon

Focus Skills:

• Explain the causes of day and night and the moon's phases

• Explain the causes of day and night based on the Earth's rotation on its axis

• Explain the monthly changes in the appearance of the moon based on its orbit around Earth

Strategies to Use at Home:

• Visit a science museum to check out the fossil collections

• Take a nature walk to observe signs of slow processes that change the earth's surface near your home. Look for signs of erosion near creek beds or on hills in your neighborhood. Can you find any signs of rapid processes like landslides or earthquakes near your home? Have you ever visited or lived in other places where these processes occur?

• Make observations over a week's time about how the amount of daylight changes. Talk with your child about how these changes are related to the earth's rotation and its orbit around the sun.

• Make observations over a period of time about the changes in the appearance of the moon. Draw pictures of the changes and ask your child to label them with the correct science term for each phase.

4th Quarter

1. Focus Topic: Force and Motion - Magnets and Electric Charge

Focus Skills:

• Explain how different forces affect the motion of an object

• Explain how magnets cause iron or metal objects to move without touching them

• Explain how electrically charged objects push or pull other electrically charged objects and produce motion

2. Focus Topic: Forms and Interactions of Energy

Focus Skills:

• Recognize that energy takes various forms

• Recognize the basic forms of energy (light, heat, sound, electrical, magnetic) are the ability to cause motion or create change

• Recognize that light moves in a straight line until it strikes an object or travels from one medium to another. Light can be reflected, refracted or absorbed.

Strategies to Use at Home:

• Parents and child go on an electricity scavenger hunt through your home. Observe the ways in which electricity is used and look for how electric energy enters our homes: wires, outlets, switches, plugs, fuse boxes, transformers, etc.

• Discuss differences and similarities between static and current electricity.

• Read about Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Alessandro Volta, Nikola Tesla and the many other scientists who contributed to our understanding of electricity.

• Experiment with the five forms of energy (light, heat, sound, electrical and magnetic) and their ability to cause motion or create change. Can any of them do both? What kinds of objects work with each form of energy?