4^th Grade Living Environment Unit Blueprint

Session I—1 day
Session II—2 to 3 days
Terrarium Observations & Maintenance—1-2 times per week

Teacher Resources:
Tips	Temperature and Isopods Experiment (Microsoft® Word® document)  Temperature and Isopods Experiment (Adobe® Reader® PDF 116 KB)	Setting Up the Experiment (10 Minutes) Tips for Analyzing Data (4 Minutes)

How can changes to an organism's habitat affect its survival?

5D(3-5)#4: Changes in an organism's habitat are sometimes beneficial to it and sometimes harmful.

Note: The lesson does not specifically address the benchmarks. Start by focusing on students' understanding of how the experiments relate to environmental factors. Encourage students to generalize about how environmental factors can affect plants and animals.

• Do students understand that an environmental factor may be helpful to one organism and harmful to another?

• Do students understand that a change in the environment (a change in environmental factor) can affect an organism's survival?
• Do students understand why all plants and animals can't live in the same environment?

12C(3-5)#3: Keep a notebook that describes observations made, carefully distinguishes actual observations from ideas and speculations about what was observed, and is understandable weeks or months later.

Click to view student work samples.

• Do students' written observations include factual information, not ideas or explanations?
• Do students' written observations include a description of the movement of the isopods?
• Do students' written observations include quantitative data? (Example: Three isopods sat at the cold end of the trough. One isopod moved back and forth between the 20ºC and 24ºC sections?)

Click to view student work samples.

Brainteaser (See page 145 in Teacher's Guide. Have students justify optimum temperature—an "Explain Your Choice(s)" student sheet is available on the electronic curriculum under "Teacher Resources.")

• If results vary significantly among groups, do students recognize the need to discuss experiment procedures used in each group? Do students recognize the shortcomings of the experiment? Do students recognize the benefit of running more trials and/or a different experiment to resolve the differences in the observations?
• Are students able to articulate why a "fair" experiment is important?
• If experiment results are similar, are students able to identify an optimal range of temperatures for isopods? Do students use their data and/or class data to support their choice of optimal temperature? Are students able to use the identified temperature range to suggest a real environment suitable for isopods?

Brainteaser

• Are the students able to use/interpret the data to determine the optimal temperature?
• Are the students able to use the data and terrarium observations to support/justify the chosen temperature?

12E(3-5)#2: Recognize when comparisons might not be fair because some conditions are not kept the same.

How do experiment results help determine an optimal environment for an organism?

5D(3-5)#1: For any particular environment, some kinds of plants survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.

12D(3-5)#3: Use numerical data in describing and comparing objects and events.

1B(3-5)#3: Scientists' explanations about what happens in the world come partly from what they observe, partly from what they think. Sometimes scientists have different explanations for the same set of observations. That usually leads to making more observations to resolve the differences.