🔬 3rd grade Science: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🧊Matter & Particles

   All matter is made of tiny particles. How particles are arranged in solids, liquids and gases, and how heating and cooling cause melting, freezing, evaporation and condensation.

2. 🧲Pushes, Pulls & Forces

   Forces as pushes and pulls, contact and non-contact forces (gravity, magnetism, static electricity), friction, how bigger forces change motion more, and helmets and seat belts as safety devices.

3. 🏎️Speed & Motion

   Practices speed as the distance an object travels in a certain time, inertia (objects keep doing what they are doing until a force acts), and how mass and force affect how quickly motion changes.

4. 🌻How Plants Grow & Change

   From seed to flower and back to seed, how seeds travel, how plants react to light and seasons, and how they use sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to make food and release oxygen.

5. 🦋Basic Needs & Life Cycles

   Practices the basic needs of organisms (food, water, air, shelter) and the life cycles of plants and animals, including metamorphosis in butterflies and frogs.

6. 🐺Surviving in a Habitat

   Practices why some animals live in groups, how small differences in traits can help some individuals survive, and why some organisms do well in a habitat while others cannot survive there.

7. 🕸️Food Chains & Webs

   Producers, consumers and decomposers, herbivores, carnivores and omnivores, how energy moves along a food chain, and why a food web is a more complete picture.

8. 🐻Animal Survival

   Body features (thick fur, webbed feet, shells, camouflage) and behaviors (hibernating, migrating, storing food) that help animals survive.

9. 🦕Texas Fossils

   Practices how fossils form and what they show about past living things and environments, with common Texas fossils: dinosaur tracks along the Paluxy River, ammonites and other sea shells from when an ocean covered much of Texas, petrified wood, and mammoth bones at Waco.

10. 🪐Sun, Earth, Moon & Planets

    Practices that Earth orbits the Sun and the Moon orbits Earth, how long those orbits take, and the order of the eight planets from the Sun.

11. 🌋Weather, Soil & Sudden Changes

    Practices comparing weather in different places on the same day (temperature, wind direction, precipitation), how sand and clay form from weathered rock and how decomposed plants and animals add to soil, and rapid changes to Earth's surface such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and landslides.

12. ♻️Resources, Floods & Droughts

    Practices how people use natural resources to build, farm, travel and make products, why conservation matters, ways to reduce, reuse and recycle, and how natural changes such as floods and droughts help some living things and harm others.