Your students will learn about plant structures and their functions, how plants make food, classifying plants, how plants respond to their environment, and more. This is a complete unit for teaching about plants, including a 14-page informational text. The unit includes teaching notes for 21 lesson plans, pieces for the lapbook, a unit test, three quizzes, and a 136-slide PowerPoint! The unit includes four hands-on explorations with data sheets.

This Plants Unit 14-page informational text includes six pages about plant parts and how those parts help the plant survive: roots, stems, leaves, seeds, flowers, fruit, cones, spores, and photosynthesis; four pages about classifying plants as flowering or nonflowering plants including ferns, conifers, mosses, liverworts, and hornworts; and another four pages about plant responses to light, gravity, temperature, and touch. This nonfiction text is a great way to practice close reading in the content areas. The informational text can supplement or replace your science textbook.

As your students read and learn about plants, the lapbook gives your students a way to show and practice what they have learned. They can complete 8 different pieces to make a lapbook about what they've learned about plants. These pieces are great for formative assessment as you work through the unit.

The unit includes suggested teaching notes with lesson plans and objectives to use as you go through the unit and the PowerPoint. Of course, you are always free to put your own spin on the unit! The PowerPoint doesn't have anything fancy to distract from the content. It just has great photographs that go along with the content in the text.

This unit contains four different hands-on explorations for your students to discover how roots affect a plant's growth, how much water sphagnum moss can absorb, and how roots respond to gravity. Each exploration comes with a Data Sheet for students to record and analyze their results. I call these explorations because they are not a true experiment using variables.

The informational text is perfect for meeting your Common Core Reading Standards!! I wrote this Plant Unit because I couldn't find anything appropriate for my third-graders! I wanted something that incorporated information that wasn't too simple. I wanted to be able to meet the new demands of the Common Core for informational text. This text will provide your students with a rigorous text, but it's written in a way that will allow your third, fourth, and fifth grade students to be successful in reading and comprehending the information.

This unit addresses these Florida Next Generation Sunshine State Standards:
SC.3.L.14.1: Describe structures in plants and their roles in food production, support, water and nutrient transport, and reproduction.

SC.3.L.14.2: Investigate and describe how plants respond to stimuli (heat, light, gravity), such as the way plant stems grow toward light and their roots grow downward in response to gravity.

SC.3.L.15.2: Classify flowering and nonflowering plants into major groups such as those that produce seeds, or those like ferns and mosses that produce spores, according to their physical characteristics.

SC.3.L.17.2: Recognize that plants use energy from the Sun, air, and water to make their own food.

SC.3.N.1.6: Infer based on observation.

This unit does not cover SC.3.L.17.1: Describe how animals and plants respond to changing seasons.

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MegaBundle: Regions, Economics, Government & More for 3rd grade Social Studies

Science Process Skills Unit with Lapbook and Informational text

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Properties of Matter Unit with Lapbook and informational text

Sun and the Stars Unit with Lapbook and Informational Text


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