Science Curriculum Preview Committee Clarification of Learning Results

Revised 4/06/04

3-4

E2: Explain how matter changes in both chemical and physical ways.

Curriculum Organizing Questions

  • How did this change?
  • What is still the same about this substance? What has changed?
Elaboration

Students need to become familiar with the physical and chemical properties of many different kinds of materials through firsthand experience before they can be expected to consider theories that explain them.

Specific Ideas

  • Heating and cooling cause changes in the properties of materials. Many kinds of changes occur faster under hotter conditions.Benchmarks 4D1
  • When a new material is made by combining two or more materials, it has properties that are different from the original materials.Benchmarks 4D4
  • No matter how parts of an object are assembled, the weight of the whole object made is alwasy the same as the sum of the parts; and whn a thing is broken into parts, the parts have the same total weight as the original thing.Benchmarks 4D2
  • Water can be a liquid or a solid and can go back and forth from one form to the other. If water is turned into ice and then the ice is allowed to melt, the amount of water is the same as it was before freezing. NSES B1c
  • Substances react chemically in characteristic ways with other substances to form new substances (compounds) with different characteristic properties. In chemical reactions, the total mass is conserved. SFAA p.47
Developmental & Instructional Implications

Bringing atomic and molecular theory into the earlier grades is a great temptation, but most students are not ready to understand atomic theory before adolescence. The theory is certainly essential to much of modern scientific explanation, but moving atomic/molecular thoery forward to the earlier grades should be resisted. Benchmarks 4D essay p.77

Examples

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