Focus: In this unit, students examine physical and behavioral traits for survival as they plan an animal sanctuary and rehab agency. Students will then apply what they learn to determine how an animal rehab agency imitates nature to help animals survive. Students will further investigate traits, parents, offspring, and behaviors in Grade 3 Unit 2 Life Cycles, Traits, and Variations. They will further investigate structure, function, and information processing in plants and animals in Grade 5 Unit 2 Structures and Functions of Living Things.
Students explore concepts that include the following:
- All organisms have external parts. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, move from place to place, and seek, find, and take in food, water, and air. Plants also have different parts (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits) that help them survive and grow.
- Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and offspring engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive.
- Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive. Plants also respond to some external inputs.
- Young animals are very much but not exactly like their parents. Plants also are very much but not exactly like their parents. Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways.
Engineers and engineering designers use knowledge of the things animals and plants need for survival when designing solutions that help living things. This series of lessons incorporates learning goals that support the principles and practices of engineering design, such as defining problems, testing materials, and evaluating possible solutions.
Number of Lessons: 4, each lesson is divided into 4-5 lesson segments.
Instruction Time: We recommend that you plan for about 30-45 minutes for each lesson segment. We further recommend that you spend a minimum of thirty-eight days and a maximum of fifty-seven days teaching the Plant and Animal Survival unit so that you have time to teach the other units in the Grade 1 CKSci series.
Please note that a Pacing Guide is provided within the Teacher Guide so teachers can map out customized instructional days for this unit.
Additional Search Terms:
structure • body part • plant • animal • survival • animal senses • tropism • plant senses • bloom • parent • offspring • species • trait • behavior • communicate • naturalist • conservationist • nonfiction • informational text
CKSci Grade Levels: CKSci units are correlated to topics at the grade levels specified in the K–5 Core Knowledge Science Sequence.
