CONTENT STANDARD D: Earth and Space Science
As a result of their activities in grades K-4, all students should develop
an understanding of
- Properties of Earth materials
- Objects in the sky
- Changes in Earth and sky
As a result of their activities in grades 5-8, all students should develop
an understanding of
- Structure of the Earth system
- Earth's history
- Earth in the solar system
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By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that
- There are more stars in the sky than anyone can easily count, but
they are not scattered evenly, and they are not all the same in brightness
or color.
- The sun can be seen only in the daytime, but the moon can be seen
sometimes at night and sometimes during the day. The sun, moon, and
stars all appear to move slowly across the sky.
- The moon looks a little different every day, but looks the same again
about every four weeks.
- Some events in nature have a repeating pattern. The weather changes
some from day to day, but things such as temperature and rain (or snow)
tend to be high, low, or medium in the same months every year.
- Water can be a liquid or a solid and can go back and forth from one
form to the other. If water is turned into ice and then the ice is allowed
to melt, the amount of water is the same as it was before freezing.
- Water left in an open container disappears, but water in a closed
container does not disappear.
- Chunks of rocks come in many sizes and shapes, from boulders to grains
of sand and even smaller.
- Change is something that happens to many things.
- Animals and plants sometimes cause changes in their surroundings.
By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that
- The patterns of stars in the sky stay the same, although they appear
to move across the sky nightly, and different stars can be seen in different
seasons.Telescopes magnify the appearance of some distant objects in
the sky, including the moon and the planets. The number of stars that
can be seen through telescopes is dramatically greater than can be seen
by the unaided eye.
- Planets change their positions against the background of stars.
- The earth is one of several planets that orbit the sun, and the moon
orbits around the earth.
- Stars are like the sun, some being smaller and some larger, but so
far away that they look like points of light.
- Things on or near the earth are pulled toward it by the earth's gravity.
- Like all planets and stars, the earth is approximately spherical in
shape. The rotation of the earth on its axis every 24 hours produces
the night-and-day cycle. To people on earth, this turning of the planet
makes it seem as though the sun, moon, planets, and stars are orbiting
the earth once a day.
- When liquid water disappears, it turns into a gas (vapor) in the air
and can reappear as a liquid when cooled, or as a solid if cooled below
the freezing point of water. Clouds and fog are made of tiny droplets
of water.
- Air is a substance that surrounds us, takes up space, and whose movement
we feel as wind.
- Waves, wind, water, and ice shape and reshape the earth's land surface
by eroding rock and soil in some areas and depositing them in other
areas, sometimes in seasonal layers.
- Rock is composed of different combinations of minerals. Smaller rocks
come from the breakage and weathering of bedrock and larger rocks. Soil
is made partly from weathered rock, partly from plant remains-and also
contains many living organisms.
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