The students practice the skills of inquiry by setting up and monitoring controlled experiments about the needs of bean plants and develop skills such as observing, recording, measuring, comparing and analyzing. Students keep journals of plant growth and development and investigate the structures of plants and seeds and the functions of each structure. They propagate additional plants from various plant parts and observe the plants' growth and development. They describe and record their explanations of how the systems produce sound. They observe sounds at home and in the neighborhood and describe and compare how those sounds are produced.
Students investigate ways to change pitch and volume by changing something in a sound system.
In this module, students work with batteries, wires, and bulbs, simple motors and switches to learn about the flow of electricity. They create complete and incomplete circuits and explore multiple ways to get a bulb to light and a motor to run. The module also includes investigations of the ability of materials to conduct electricity or to insulate from such conduction. They use their shadows to determine the changing position of the Sun in the daytime sky and use direct observations to describe the changing position of the Moon during the day and at night and of the stars in the nighttime sky. Students also observe that the Moon appears to change its shape every day in a repeating pattern that takes approximately one month.