Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Analyzing and Interpreting Data
Crosscutting Concepts
Scale, Proportion, and Quantity
Knowledge
Students know:
- That fossils represent plants and animals that lived long ago.
- The relationships between the fossils of organisms and the environments in which they lived.
- The relationships between types of fossils and the current environments where similar organisms are found.
- That some fossil represent organisms that lived long ago and have no modern counterparts.
- The relationships between fossils of organisms that lived long ago and their modern counterparts.
- The relationships between existing animals and the environments in which they currently live.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Organize data about fossils of animals and plants.
- Identify and describe relationships in the data to make sense of fossils.
- Interpret data to make sense of fossils.
- Provide evidence based on data from fossils.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- Fossils provide evidence of organisms that lived long ago.
- Features of fossils provide evidence of organisms that lived long ago and of what types of environments those organisms must have lived in.
- Science assumes consistent patterns in natural systems (based on relationships found in the data).
- Environments can look very different now than they did a long time ago.
Vocabulary
- Analyze
- Interpret
- Data
- Fossils
- Type (mold fossils, cast fossils, trace fossils, true form fossils)
- Size
- Distribution
- Evidence
- Organisms
- Environment
- Extinct
- Relationships
