Wren and Sitka's Field Notebook: 25 Nature Science Lessons Bundle, Grades 3-5

By the end of this

• — Your child can say why a candle flame and a river are not alive, using the whole list of jobs a living thing does
• — Your child can tell a dog family track from a cat family track by looking for claw marks
• — Your child can look at a bird's beak and say what it most likely eats
• — Your child can explain why a split feather stops working, and what a bird does about it
• — Your child can name what a raven does that shows it understands what another animal saw
• — Your child can name the four stages of complete metamorphosis and say why the caterpillar and butterfly eat different food
• — Your child can explain how a dead salmon feeds a tree growing well back from the water
• — Your child can draw a food chain with the arrows pointing the right way, and say why they point at the eater
• — Your child can explain why a picky eater is in more trouble than a generalist when one food disappears
• — Your child can guess whether an animal hunts or is hunted by where its eyes sit
• — Your child can tell camouflage from mimicry and say what each one is telling a predator
• — Your child can name the three ways an animal survives winter and say what each one costs
• — Your child can explain what actually lifts water to the top of a tall tree, with no pump involved
• — Your child can read a stump and say what the weather was like in a given year
• — Your child can explain what a plant gets in return for the energy it spends making sweet fruit
• — Your child can explain what a leaf's green colour tells you about the sunlight it uses
• — Your child can say what is lost when a bare field meets a heavy storm, and why it matters for centuries
• — Your child can sort rocks into igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic by looking at them
• — Your child can explain why we cannot make more water, only move it around the cycle
• — Your child can look at the clouds and say what weather to expect this afternoon
• — Your child can name the mistake in using one cold day as evidence about climate
• — Your child can explain why the moon changes shape, and why it is not the Earth's shadow
• — Your child can find north at night from the Big Dipper, and say why a dim star beats a bright one
• — Your child can explain how two animals share a habitat but never a niche
• — Your child can separate what they observed from what they think it means, and mark which is which