Activate Learning PRIME® Elementary Science

The Tracking the Weather topic encourages children to build on their natural sense of wonder and curiosity about the world while they: 

• Make drawings of weather scenes, themselves wearing indoor and outdoor clothing, clouds and precipitation, and wind. 
• Record daily weather conditions and look for patterns in the weather data during each season and over the entire year. 
• Create seasonal Weather Books that contain a variety of their drawings. 
• Explore severe weather such as hurricanes and tornadoes, and learn how to prepare for them to stay safe.

The Examining Living Things topic encourages children to think and work as biologists. During this topic, the children: 

• Learn about what it means to be a biologist, and engage in a biologist’s practices of exploring the world. 
• Discover that the structures of plants and animals are related to their functions. 
• Observe and record patterns in the structures of different plants, and in the structures and behaviors of different animals. 
• Appreciate that by mimicking how other living things meet their needs, humans can look to the natural world to design solutions to our problems. 
• Model and create a nature-inspired solution to a human problem. 

The Solids, Liquids, and Gases topic opens children’s eyes to the materials around them and the way things change. During this topic, the children:

• Learn about the properties of objects, such as size, weight, color, and texture. 
• Identify the different materials that make up common objects, and think about the properties that make each material useful. 
• Discover that different objects can be made from the same set of pieces. 
• Identify solids, liquids, and gases in their own environment. 
• Compare different materials to explore the properties that help us classify things as solids or liquids. 
• Explore how water (and other things) can change from a liquid to a solid, and back to a liquid—over and over. 
• Discover that some changes caused by cooling and heating are reversible, and other changes are irreversible.

The Inheritance and Variation topic encourages children to develop a new understanding of the phenomena and processes that govern the characteristics and features of living things and impact their ability to survive in their habitat. During this topic, the children:

• Look carefully at dogs to understand what a trait is and how traits can have variations within the same kind of organism. 
• Observe and describe the similarities and differences between parent animals and plants and their offspring to learn that organisms inherit traits from their parents. 
• Read about the environmental influences on traits and use that information to identify the differences in offspring they observe.
• Read case studies about flamingos, frogs, and snowshoe hares and then use those to support a claim that the environment can affect animals’ traits. 
• Look at how variation in traits of frogs and mice affect their ability to survive in their habitats. 
• Create bar graphs to analyze data about frogs. 
• Play a game where they act as predators to understand how variation in color affects survival.

The Technology and Energy topic helps students discover the wonders of electricity, other forms of energy, and the relationship of energy to making technology work. During this topic, the students:

• Try out ideas about how to light a bulb with a battery and wires. 
• Recognize and use the components in a battery-bulb circuit. 
• Build a circuit with a battery and motor. 
• Explore conductors and insulators of electric current. 
• Recognize electrical hazards and the safe use of electricity. 
• Build and use light bulb holders. 
• Draw circuit symbols and schematics. 
• Learn about parallel and serial circuits.
• Design, build, and demonstrate a circuit that solves a problem.
• Explore different types of stored energy and fuels. 
• Read about renewable and non-renewable energy and power. 
• Discover how our use of energy impacts our world. 
• Explore energy efficiency.

The Investigating Matter topic recognizes that to understand their world, students must have many experiences with matter. During this topic, the students:

• Define matter and identify many of its common properties. 
• Become familiar with the common states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.
• Plan and conduct an investigation to prove that air has weight. 
• Conduct investigations to show that materials can be identified based on their properties. 
• Show that the weight of matter doesn’t change when heated or cooled or when mixed with other substances. 
• Discover the differences between physical and chemical changes. 
• Plan and conduct fair tests involving chemical changes to show that the weight of matter stays the same during these changes. 
• Discover how unusual mixtures have properties, unlike other materials they explore in the topic.