Elementary / Kindergarten
Kindergarten
Plant + Algae = Total Photosynthesis for the Earth
Kindergarten has exactly one life science standard in all of NGSS, and it is about what living things need to stay alive. A sealed bag with something growing in it answers that better than a worksheet does. Nothing here needs reading or writing. Children look, say what they see, and draw it.
What standards are covered
What living things need to survive
Standard: Use observations to describe patterns of what plants and animals, including humans, need to survive.
This is the only life science standard in the whole of kindergarten. Lessons 1 and 3 below cover it outright.
How animals change the environment
Standard: Construct an argument supported by evidence for how plants and animals, including humans, can change the environment to meet their needs.
Status: Lesson 4 below covers it, and it is finished. Most classrooms meet this one from a picture of a beaver. This one has a control and a measurement, and the children build the argument from what they saw.
If it is not a kindergarten standard, it is not on this page
Why: Plenty of our lessons work fine in a kindergarten room, but their standard sits in grade 1 or grade 2. Listing those here would make your planning harder, not easier.
Where they are: On the grade 1 and grade 2 pages, and on the subject pages.
Look at grade 1 and 2 as well
Why: Both states introduce several of these concepts a year or two ahead of NGSS, so a lesson filed under grade 1 or 2 here can be exactly on grade in a Texas or Florida kindergarten.
On every lesson: The NGSS, Texas and Florida codes are printed on the cover page.
Lessons
Lessons for the Kindergarten Classroom
Each lesson is one document. The teacher pages come first, then the answer keys, then the student pages behind the orange PRINT FROM HERE divider, so you print from the divider to the end. They are Word files you can edit. Who Changed the Water? also comes as a PDF.
What Eats Light?
Standard: K-LS1-1, what living things need to survive.
Three sealed bags go in the window on Day 1. One grows a radish, one grows algae, one grows algae with brine shrimp eating it. By Friday the bag with animals in it is less green than the bag without them. Nobody predicts that. One week, ten minutes a day.
File: ARS-K2-BBE-001, written for kindergarten through grade 2.
Do Plants Need Light?
Standard: K-PS3-1, the effect of sunlight. It only counts for that standard if you run the shading variant, where one set of bags stays in the light and the other is covered. Skip the shading and it is still a good lesson, it just is not K-PS3-1.
Light is the one thing you change. Children compare the two sets and say what is different, which is all kindergarten needs to do here.
File: ARS-K5-BBE-002, written for kindergarten through grade 5, so use the youngest version.
My Pet Brainy Briny Family
Standard: K-LS1-1, what living things need to survive.
A speck in a packet that does not move, until you add salt water. Six weeks of feeding an animal that starts life with one eye and ends up with three, with a radish growing alongside it from seed to flower to seed.
File: ARS-K5-BBE-006, written for kindergarten through grade 5.
Who Changed the Water?
Standard: K-ESS2-2, how animals change the environment to meet their needs. It counts when the children state the argument themselves, out loud or on the page, rather than you stating it for them.
Two bags start out the same. One of them gets brine shrimp. A week later the water in that bag is clearer, and the children can measure the difference. The only thing that was different was the animals, so the argument makes itself. The shrimp were not trying to clean the water. They were trying to eat.
File: ARS-K2-BBE-010, written for kindergarten through grade 2. This is the one lesson that also comes as a PDF.
Free downloads
The other two things worth having
The student pages and the answer keys are inside each lesson document now, so there is nothing separate to chase. There is one Administrator Guide for the whole of elementary rather than one per lesson, which is the document to hand a principal or a curriculum director. The folder holds every elementary lesson, kindergarten through grade 5.