Grade 3 science, unit by unit

What science should a third grader do at home, with what materials?

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Third grade science works best when your child measures something and then says what it means. Investigating Our World: Forces, Life, and Earth Systems has nine units and 24+ hours, mostly with a spring scale, a ramp, magnets, a bean plant and a thermometer. Four words come back all year: force, pattern, trait and evidence.

The nine units

Forces and Motion. Invisible Forces: Magnets and Static Electricity. Life Cycles of Plants and Animals. Inheritance and Variation of Traits. God Made the World. Fossils and Environments of the Past. Organisms in a Changing Environment. Weather Patterns and Hazards. Capstone: Systems We Can Explain.

Ramps, scales and a table that pushes back

In Unit 1 your child measures with a spring scale how much force starts a toy car moving on three surfaces, then rolls balls down ramps and predicts how far one will go from a height never tried. The guide's trick for 'the table is not doing anything' is to put a bathroom scale under a stack of books.

Pulls with nothing touching

Unit 2 tests which magnet ends attract, charges a balloon with wool and designs a fair test that changes only the distance between a magnet and a paperclip. It is the first time your child holds everything else steady on purpose.

A bean plant, a frog and a long log

Unit 3 follows a frog from egg to adult and keeps a dated, measured log of a bean plant for weeks. Unit 4 then separates traits you are born with from traits picked up in life, and graphs one measured trait across many samples.

God made the world

Unit 5 covers God making everything in six days, plants and animals after their kind, how the flood made fossils, and how old the earth is. The next unit then compares fossil traits with living ones and stacks rock layers with the oldest at the bottom.

A weather log and a capstone

Your child keeps a multi-week weather log and graphs the temperature, then matches a hazard to a real preparedness step. The capstone has them design and run their own small investigation and explain it to the family.

What this is not

It is not a light add-on. The guide plans five days a week, about 50 minutes a day, for the full school year, with a short delayed re-test a week after each unit.
It is not a fact-memorizing course. The point in the guide is saying 'here is what I measured, here is the pattern, here is what I think it means,' not knowing facts about frogs or magnets.
It is not neutral on origins. Unit 5 teaches six-day creation and the flood, so a family that wants another view of earth history will want to look at that unit first.

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Questions parents ask

What do I need to gather?

A spring scale, a ramp, magnets, a bean plant, a thermometer and index cards for sorting. The guide describes the materials as things you have at home.

What should my child already do?

Read a ruler or scale to the nearest whole unit, read a simple two-column chart, find the highest point on a simple graph, and know that living things grow. The guide gives a one-minute check for each.

How are the ideas checked?

Each unit ends with a short written or verbal explanation, which the guide says is the real evidence the ideas stuck. The guide asks you not to skip it.

What does it cost?

$29 a month or $290 a year for every child. The first 30 days are free with no card.

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