The major units covered throughout the year include:
Metrics
Atomic Structure-
Motion-
Metrics
- Students will learn how to use tools for metric measurement.
- Students will learn the basic metric prefixes and be able to convert from one unit to another.
- Students will learn the concepts of mass, weight, distance, volume, and density.
- Students will learn how to ask questions and define problems; develop and use models; plan and carry out investigations; analyze and interpret data; use mathematics and computational thinking; construct explanations and design solutions; engage in an argument from evidence; and obtain, evaluate, and communicate information.
Atomic Structure-
- Students will develop models to describe the atomic composition of simple molecules and extended structures.
- Students will analyze and interpret data on the properties of substances before and after substances interact to determine if a chemical reaction has occurred.
- Students will develop and use a model to describe how the total number of atoms does not change in a chemical reaction and thus mass is conserved.
- Students will gather and make sense of information to describe that synthetic materials come from natural resources and impact society.
- Students will develop a model that predicts and describes changes in particle motion, temperature, and state of a pure substance when thermal energy is added or removed.
- Students will undertake a design project to construct, test, and modify a device that either releases or absorbs thermal energy by chemical processes.
- Students will analyze and interpret data on the distribution of fossils and rocks, continental shapes, and seafloor structures to provide evidence of the past plate motions.
- Students will construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for how uneven distributions of natural resources are the result of past and current geoscience processes.
Motion-
- Students will apply Newton's Third Law to design a solution to a problem involving motion of two colliding objects.
- Students will plan an investigation to provide evidence that the change in an object's motion depends on the sum of the forces on the object and the mass of the object (Newton's First and Second Laws).
- Students will construct and interpret graphical displays of data to describe the relationships of kinetic energy to the mass of an object and to the speed of an object.
- Students will develop a model to describe that when the arrangement of objects interacting at a distance changes, different amounts of potential energy are stored in the system.