Magnet Design & Ecosystems

The big idea

Your child works as an engineer, defining a problem a magnet can solve, sketching designs, building a magnet latch for a shoebox cabinet and improving it with fair tests. Week 8 is a full fair-test investigation from question to graph. After the Quarter 1 review, the unit turns to ecosystems: producers, consumers and decomposers, habitats and adaptations, and food chains and webs that show energy moving from the sun.

Standards in plain words

• 3-PS2-4 Defines a simple design problem that can be solved with ideas about magnets.
• 3-5-ETS1-1 Defines a simple design problem, including what success looks like and limits on materials, time or cost.
• 3-5-ETS1-2 Comes up with several possible solutions and compares how well each is likely to meet the goals and limits.
• 3-5-ETS1-3 Plans and runs fair tests that change one thing at a time and look for weak points, to find ways to improve a model or prototype.
• 3-PS2-1 Plans and carries out investigations to show what balanced and unbalanced forces do to an object's motion.
• 3-PS2-2 Observes or measures an object's motion to find a pattern that can predict what it will do next.
• 3-LS4-3 Argues from evidence that in a given habitat some living things survive well, some survive less well and some cannot survive at all.
• 3-LS4-4 Judges how well a solution works for a problem caused when an environment changes and the plants and animals living there may change.

Anchor texts

• Reading About Our World passages: 'Engineers Solve Problems with Magnets' (Week 7), 'Motion That Repeats' (Week 9 review) and 'A Pond Is an Ecosystem' (Week 10)
• Video hub topics: defining a design problem, asking a testable question, producers, consumers and decomposers, world habitats, and how the sun powers food chains

Watch across the unit

• Watch for: Mixing up criteria (goals) and constraints (limits).

  Try: For each item ask, 'Is this something the latch must DO, or a rule that LIMITS us?'

• Watch for: Pointing food chain arrows from the eater to the food, or calling the sun a producer.

  Try: Teach 'the arrow carries the energy' from the food to the eater; the sun is not alive, so it is the energy source, not a producer.

• Watch for: Thinking an animal grows an adaptation because it needs one.

  Try: Say, 'Animals are born with their body features. Over many generations, the ones whose features fit their habitat survived and had more young.'