Students who demonstrate understanding can:
Make observations to construct an evidence-based account that young plants and animals are like, but not exactly like, their parents. (1-LS3-1)
Building towards: Develop models to describe that organisms have unique and diverse life cycles but all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death. (3-LS1-1)
Review the Teacher Background section below, including potential Prior Knowledge and potential Learner Misconceptions and ways to address them.
Print out the Stages of Rockweed Hand-out and the Salmon Life Stages Hand-out.
Collect or print out a variety of other seaweed, beach plant, and beach animal images. Possible sources:
If possible, take or obtain photos of people gathering local plants as food.
For more background on how to develop a science notebook, see Science Notebooks in Grades K-2.
Additional vocabulary: Common names of seaweeds (e.g, sea lettuce, rockweed, kelps)
(15 mins.)
To provide additional student practice with observation and description skills, the Alaska Seas and Watersheds Grade 1 investigation Shells: Take a Closer Look gives students the opportunity to touch and look at the large assortment of shells of the same species (butter clam and mussel shells work well), then choose one shell they would like to “take a closer look at.” They then draw their shell, noting unique characteristics and describing it. The teacher then reads the description to the class to see it other students can find that shell based on the description and students have the opportunity to try to improve their descriptions.
(15 mins.) Allow students to enjoy exploring the intertidal area. Help students focus in on a specific area by describing the boundaries and ask them to listen for a specific signal (whistle, bell, etc.) to gather for the scientific investigation - looking for young plants and animals! Allow children 15 minutes at the beach to explore and investigate beach areas and tide pools.
(30 mins.)
Review properties that can be noticed such as color, shape, size, type of place the plant lives (its habitat).
Take a picture of the patch that shows the individual variability.
(15 mins.)
If the weather and student attention for listening permits, gather students back together in the large group to share their evidence. Start with one type of plant. If possible, have samples of the different kinds of plants that have obvious differences between young and adults that are evident from looking.
First ask: What did you find? Guide discussion, emphasizing differences between the adult and young plants of each species, emphasizing color, size, shape, texture, and the type of place where each adult and young plant was found. Ask additional questions about making observations: How can we find more information by more observations? What do you wonder about this plant that you can’t find out just by looking at it? What other types of observations could you make?
Then ask: What types of traits did you observe in your patch of plants (or animals)? In what ways were all of the individuals in the patch the same? How were they different?
If the weather makes this discussion difficult, hold it back in the classroom instead. You can supplement the discussion in the classroom or review what was discussed at the end of the field trip by organizing the photos taken and providing more information in the form of line drawings, photos in books, and videos.
In their science notebooks, students can draw and/or add and label printed photos, noting similarities and differences of immature/young and adult plants. They can also draw and label the traits that were the same and different in the type of plant or animal they observed in the patch.
(15 mins.)
Formative Assessments: Compare and contrast discussions provide the opportunity for formative assessment of understanding.
Use follow up lessons, clipboard qualitative notes, a collection of photos/drawings with labels and/or video tape of a class discussion to evaluate student performance in using observations to make evidence-based accounts, using vocabulary words correctly and displaying a deeper understanding of the pattern of young and adult plants and animals.
(15 mins.)
Children use a T-chart (See example) to draw and label (using line drawings or their own drawings) one self-chosen plant from the beach trip (Possible focus species: rockweed, sea lettuce, dulse, kelp). The left side will have the immature/young plant and the right side will have the mature plant. The box at the bottom could include similarities of young with adults.
Formative assessment during the activity could include pre- and post- discussions with individual students or in small groups and the whole group. Sharing line drawings and identifying patterns across student work is valuable for building student experience and conceptual understanding.
Young children need multiple experiences across content to build conceptual understanding. Follow up with reading other books and incorporating other experiences that identify and highlight features of young and mature plants and animals in local environments and environments they may not have experienced like deserts, tropical forests, and arctic tundra.
Reading books and viewing videos about the behaviors of parent and young will address the NGSS Performance Expectation that students are able to determine patterns in behavior of parents and offspring that help offspring survive (1-LS1-2). Video resource: Amazing Moms (includes wolves and brown bears)
For more background on the biology of marine invertebrates and a source for line drawings, see Marine Invertebrate Background Information.
Your spring beach field trip will provide opportunities for students to observe young seaweeds and other beach plants. (Seaweeds are technically not plants in the Plantae Kingdom; they are macro-algae which photosynthesize and fulfill the role of producer in coastal ecosystems.) Students may also have the opportunity to observe adult (mature) plants either on the way to the beach or what’s left of annual seaweeds from the previous year or longer-lived kelps that have washed up on the beach.
Students will also have opportunities to see young marine invertebrates (Examples: barnacles, mussels, crabs, that have settled on the beach after being a larva in the plankton.) The concept of metamorphosis from larva to adult is beyond the assessment boundary of the NGSS Performance Expectation but you can provide opportunities to compare and contrast larval and adult forms of some species they are likely to observe. Students can begin thinking about young marine invertebrates as immature animals growing into their adult (mature) form when they will be able to reproduce.
Previous Student Knowledge:
Students should know that all plants and animals grow over the course of their lifetime. They should also know that plants grow from seeds and young plants begin as shoots and then grow leaves. This learning will be extended to the understanding that plants also grow from other seed-like structures (spores in the case of seaweeds) and may grow leaf-like structures. If they have already completed a first grade science unit with a focus on external structures and functions of plant and animal parts (NGSS PE 1-LS1-1), their understanding can be reinforced by observations they make on the field trip and subsequent classroom discussion.
Student Knowledge and Skills, Pre-Field Trip: The classroom “gear up” activities in this lesson plan are designed to give students opportunities to observe a variety of young and adult plants and animals in books and pictures and discuss the concept of traits, individual variation in traits, and how young resemble, but are not always, exactly like their parents.
It will provide experiences for students to authentically use vocabulary they will need on the field session: adult, immature, size, holdfast, etc. and provide them with practice in gently touching, handling and observing sea weeds and animals on the beach, noting where they found what after study and observation.
Possible learner preconceptions, misconceptions and instructional clarifications:
Learner Preconception/misconception: Students need to build an understanding of biological concepts through direct experience with living things in local habitats. The idea that organisms depend on their environment is not well developed in young children nor is the idea that there are patterns in the ways organisms change over the course of their lifetime. Over the course of the K-2 grade band, students should have opportunities to investigate a variety of habitats and plants and animals at various life stages.
If students have not had the opportunity to observe a plant grow from seed into a plant, they may infer that a “small” plant or animal is a “baby” that only grows bigger rather than look at a variety of characteristics (e.g., shape, color, texture) that change as a plant or animal matures. If they have completed a unit observing a plant grow in soil, they may be confused about seaweeds being plants that can grow in places where there is none. They may think that holdfasts are the same as roots in term of function.
Instructional Clarification: The focus should be on establishing the nature of the association of organisms with their environments over time, followed by later experiences in upper elementary of dependence on various aspects of the environment, structures and behaviors plants and animals were born with that help them survive, and the process by which certain traits are inherited as a result of interactions with the environment. Giving children enough time to observe, wonder, ask questions and take another closer look will be important to developing the conceptual understanding targeted in this lesson plan.
If students are confused about plants needing soil to live, clarify that while it’s true that plants that live on land take in some substances in soil with their roots to make their own food, plants that live in the intertidal zone can obtain those same substances from the water that surrounds them when the tide is in. Since there is no soil, they have no use for roots. Consider introducing “minerals” or “materials” as a vocabulary word. When this topic is re-visited in Grade 5, the focus is on plants getting materials they need for growth chiefly from air and water.
Analyzing and Interpreting Data: Analyzing data in K–2 builds on prior experiences and progresses to collecting, recording, and sharing observations.
Use information from observations (firsthand and from media) to construct an evidence-based account for natural phenomena.
LS3: Heredity: Inheritance and Variation of Traits
LS3.A: Organization for Matter and Energy Flow in Organisms
Young animals are very much, but not exactly like, their parents. Plants also are very much, but not exactly, like their parents.
Foundational for:
LS3.B: Variation of Traits
Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways.
Patterns: Observed patterns in nature guide organization and classification and prompt questions about relationships and causes underlying them.
Patterns in the natural and human designed world can be observed, used to describe phenomena, and used as evidence.