2.LS1.3

In the last unit, students analyzed how engineers can mimic plant and animal structures to solve problems facing people. In this unit, students begin by exploring animal behaviors of parents and offspring that help the offspring survive.

In this unit, students focus on animals, analyzing how animals’ body parts help them survive and grow. This page is a high-level extract of the first lesson of the unit in which students build insect models to investigate the science phenomena of an insect’s body parts’ structure and function. Students observe how ants use their body parts to get what they need to survive. 

In the last unit, students explored how animals have body parts that help them survive and grow. In this unit, students apply what they have learned about the structures of plants and animals to mimic those structures to solve problems facing people. 

This unit has students exploring animal habitat and predator-prey relationships. Once students model the living and nonliving parts of different habitats, they focus on how living things depend on other living things in their habitat for survival. As a class, students model the predator-prey relationship between foxes and rabbits in a forest habitat, and then dissect owl pellets to analyze a barn owl’s diet.

In the last unit, students investigated whether plants need light and water to grow, and then explored how flowers have specific structures that help them attract pollinators to make seeds. In this unit, students focus on one kind of pollinator—the butterfly.