What this unit is about…
Forage fish spawning beaches have been disappearing and we need to understand why. In Unit 3, corresponding to chapter 3 of Explore the Salish Sea: A Nature Guide for Kids, you and your students will explore Earth’s processes that create the perfect spawning habitat for a few species of small but mighty fish as you figure out how geology (rocks and earth processes) and hydrology (the movement of water) affect biology (life!). Because so many life forms, including humans, forage for these species and they support much of the Salish Sea food web, they are called forage fish. Some forage fish, like surf smelt and sand lance, spawn on beach rocks at high tide. But not just any beach rocks - just the right size of beach rocks.
In an investigation of how the right sized beach rocks and other beach characteristics are supplied to spawning beaches, clues will be revealed to the earth processes that formed the Salish Sea from snow caps to white caps and how those contribute to the perfect spawning beach. Students will use these clues to solve a mystery: how to ensure safe spawning habitat for a little fish which iconic species, from sea birds to salmon and seals to killer whales, depend on.
Next Generation Science Standards in this unit:
4-ESS2-1 Measure erosion by water and ice.
5-ESS2-1 Model ways the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and/or atmosphere interact.
5-ESS3-1 How communities use science to protect the environment.
MS-ESS2-1 Model the rock cycle.
MS-ESS2-2 Explain how geoscience processes created and changed the Salish Sea .
MS-ESS3-3 (Surf smelt survey option) Monitor a sand and gravel shoreline for surf smelt egg survival.
Beach Stones delivered by glaciers to Salish Sea shores. Photo by Wendy Shattil and Bob Rozinski.
The Sequence
After you have registered for the curriculum, preparing the unit is as easy as 1, 2, 3!
Review the unit plan, and customize it to suit your needs
This unit plan is flexible, adaptable, and in Word format to ensure that your experience can be tailored geographically to your local watershed and community, and to your particular teaching objectives and needs. Use the plan like a map- it has directions, resources, learning targets and performance expectations, and more to guide every step of the way, but the adventure you and your students share is your own.
Review and customize the slideshow
This slideshow presents helpful background information, including links to online resources and videos. With helpful presenter notes, it also acts as a guide as you progress. As with the unit plan, you may want to customize certain slides to make them even more relevant and local. For this reason, it is in PowerPoint. Save a copy and make the change you see fit.
Review, customize, and print the accompanying student journal
This editable Word document is your students’ place to wonder, record observations, take notes, diagram, and plan and record scientific investigation or engineering processes. It is also a place to celebrate hard work with well-deserved stamps on the back page. Review and customize the journal to reflect the changes you’ve made in your unit plan and slideshow.
HOW TO PRINT
In Microsoft Word, click on the Layout menu, then the arrow to expand the Page Set Up options. Click Margins and select “Book Fold” in the drop down menu by Multiple pages. Print in landscape orientation on 8.5 x 14” (legal) paper with two staples along the center fold. Note: the font is Helvetica. Changing the font can change alignment of journal pages.
Utilize the materials below for additional student resources throughout the unit.
Additional Resources & Materials
Assessments
Every unit has its own pre- and post-assessments for tracking the progress and growth that students make throughout the curriculum. Links to these (and additional formative assessments!) are also provided in the unit plan.
SALISH SEA ROCKS POST-ASSESSMENT
SALISH SEA ROCKS PRE-ASSESSMENT
WONDER
Give your students a visual or sensory experience that provides a chance to wonder at a geological feature. This may be a hands-on outdoor activity, an observational field trip, or an in-classroom presentation or video that invokes curiosity about a phenomenon students can’t wait to try to solve.
Essential question
After the experience of “wonder,” it is time to give the Salish Sea Rocks Student Journal to each student. Let them get acquainted with it, and then read Explore the Salish Sea Chapter 3, Beach Stones Have Stories to Tell. Here is a time to write thoughts, ideas, and questions inspired by their reading into their journals. After students have read and written, invite an open discussion with the class. Develop an essential question around what is most important in this chapter. Your essential question will guide your explorations around a feasible mystery or problem they’d like to solve.
Background research
Once you have established an essential question, the information-gathering begins...or continues! The Explore the Salish Sea book is a great place to start, there are some additional resources in the link below, and you may find many more of your own. Of course, you’ll come back to this step throughout the process, as your questions and claims will require support.
Develop a Testable Question
This is when your students take that larger essential question and distill it down into specific, testable question. In this unit, that will have to do with a survey of the rock (or sand, gravel, etc.) at a beach near you or even on your own school grounds and whether that size of sand grains is suitable for wildlife habitat.
put science to work
Identify variables, design a procedure, carry out an investigation, analyze data, and see where active discovery leads. Will there be answers? Solutions? More questions to test? It may even be back to the drawing board to start all over again. The scientific process is never linear (and it never ends), but there is always an adventure! Read through this UC Berkeley weblink for teaching Science, then print the scientific process chart for students or to post in your classroom. Find the resources to guide your students’ own scientific process in the Slideshow and Student Journal.
communicate your findings
This is a crucial part of the scientific process! It is the part where the results of all your hard work can make a difference. This may be a difference in the choices a few citizens make each day to help the sea or a new bill on the Senate floor that changes the way our whole state helps the whales. Click on the button above to return to the Real Process of Science website’s online tool for students to build the story of their scientific process.
Photo courtesy of VPC
Click the button below to go to the Box folder of all the documents for this unit in one place.
Ideas for improvement? Share ideas and resources with our Education Coordinator, Mira, at mdlutz@ucdavis.edu.