Travel across the world to explore rainforests, coral reefs, deserts and savannas.
Benchmark C
Describe interactions of matter and energy throughout the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere (e.g. water cycle, weather and pollution).
Grade Seven Indicators
2. Explain that Earth’s capacity to absorb and recycle materials naturally (e.g., smoke, smog, sewage) can change the environmental quality depending on the length of time involved (e.g. global warming)*
3. Describe the water cycle and explain the transfer of energy between the atmosphere and hydrosphere.
4. Analyze data on the availability of fresh water that is essential for life and for most industrial and agricultural processes. Describe how rivers, lakes, and groundwater can be depleted or polluted becoming less hospitable to life and even becoming unavailable or unsuitable for life.
8. Describe how temperature and precipitation determine climatic zones (biomes) (e.g., desert, grassland, forests, tundra and alpine).
Life Sciences
Benchmark B
Describe the characteristics of an organism in terms of a combination of inherited traits and recognize reproduction as a characteristic of living organisms essential to the continuation of the species.
Grade Six Indicators
4. Recognize that an individual organism does not live forever; therefore reproduction is necessary for the continuation of every species and traits are passed on to the next generation through reproduction.
7. Recognize that likenesses between parents and offspring (e.g. eye color, flower color) are inherited. Other likenesses, such as table manners are learned.
Grade Seven Indicator
8. Investigate the great diversity among organisms.
Grade Eight Indicator
3. Explain how variations in structure, behavior or physiology allow some organisms to enhance their reproductive success and survival in a particular environment.
Benchmark C
Explain how energy entering the ecosystems as sunlight supports the life of organisms through photosynthesis and the transfer of energy through the interactions of organisms and the environment.
Grade Six Indicator
8. Describe how organisms may interact with one another.
Grade Seven Indicators
2. Investigate how organisms or populations may interact with one another through symbiotic relationships and how some species have become so adapted to each other that neither could survive without the other (e.g., predator-prey, parasitism, mutualism, and commensalism).
3. Explain how the number of organisms an ecosystem can support depends on adequate biotic (living) resources (e.g., plants, animals) and abiotic (non-living) resources (e.g., light, water, soil).
6. Summarize the ways that natural occurrences and human activity affect the transfer of energy in Earth’s ecosystems (e.g., fire, hurricanes, roads and oil spills).
Benchmark D
Explain how extinction of a species occurs when the environment changes and its adaptive characteristics are insufficient to allow survival (as seen in evidence of the fossil record).
Grade Seven Indicators
4. Investigate how overpopulation impacts an ecosystem.
5. Explain that some environmental changes occur slowly while others occur rapidly (e.g., forest and pond succession, fires and decomposition)
Grade Eight Indicator
5. Investigate how an organism adapted to a particular environment may become extinct if the environment, as shown by the fossil record, changes.
Physical Sciences
Benchmark C
Describe renewable and non-renewable sources of energy (e.g. solar, wind, fossil fuels, biomass, hydroelectricity, geothermal and nuclear energy) and the management of these sources.
Grade Six Indicator
8. Describe how renewable and nonrenewable energy resources can be managed (e.g., fossil fuels, trees, and water).
Scientific Ways of Knowing
Benchmark C
Give examples of how thinking scientifically is helpful in daily life.
Grade Six Indicator
4. Describe how the pursuit of scientific knowledge is beneficial for any career and for daily life.