This unit on Earth’s resources and human impact begins with students observing news stories and headlines of drought and flood events across the United States. Students figure out that these drought and flood events are not normal and that both kinds of events seem to be related to rising temperatures. This prompts them to develop an initial model to explain how rising temperatures could cause both droughts and floods and leads students to wonder what could cause rising temperatures, too. This initial work sets students up to ask questions related to the query: How do changes in Earth’s system impact our communities and what can we do about it?Students spend the first lesson set gathering evidence for how a change in temperature affects evaporation, precipitation, and other parts of Earth’s water system. They use evidence to support a scientific explanation that two climate variables (temperature and precipitation) are changing precipitation patterns in the case sites they investigated. Students figure out that the rising temperatures are caused by an imbalance in Earth’s carbon system, resulting in a variety of problems in different communities. The unit ends with students evaluating different kinds of solutions to these problems and how they are implemented in communities. Students work through a systematic evaluation process to consider (1) each solution’s potential to solve the carbon imbalance, (2) tradeoffs associated with solutions based on student-identified constraints, and (3) whether the solution in question makes sense for their community’s stakeholders.

OpenSciEd Demo VideoOpenSciEd Scope & Sequence VideoCSDE Model Curricula Quick Start GuideEquitable and Inclusive Curriculum  The CSDE believes in providing a set of conditions where learners are repositioned at the center of curricula planning and design. Curricula, from a culturally responsive perspective, require intentional planning for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the development of units and implementation of lessons. It is critical to develop a learning environment that is relevant to and reflective of students’ social, cultural, and linguistic experiences to effectively connect their culturally and community-based knowledge to the class. Begin by connecting what is known about students’ cognitive and interdisciplinary diversity to the learning of the unit. Opposed to starting instructional planning with gaps in students’ knowledge, plan from an asset-based perspective by starting from students’ strengths. In doing so, curricula’s implementation will be grounded in instruction that engages, motivates, and supports the intellectual capacity of all students.Course Description: Using 3-Dimesional design pedagogy, Connecticut’s NGSS employ: Science/Engineering Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI’s) and Crosscutting Concepts that are used to make up Student Expectations:Each year, students in Connecticut should be able to demonstrate greater capacity for connecting knowledge across, and between, the physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering design. During Grade 8, students will begin to form deeper connections between concepts previously learned in grades K–7, such as collecting evidence and drawing conclusions, understanding relationships between objects, and critical thinking that leads to designing effective solutions for problems. Upon completion of Grade 8, students should have a deeper understanding of: • Physical and theoretical forces and contact;• The Earth and its place in space;• Natural selection and evolution, and; • Concepts of genetics and heredity.Aligned Core Resources:Core resources is a local control decision.  Ensuring alignment of resources to the standards is critical for success. The CSDE has identified OpenSciEd as a highly aligned core resource after a rigorous review process. Additional Course Information: NGSS has unique features. To better understand the make-up of NGSS visit the following website for a more detailed break-down of the CT Science standards from which this curriculum was based. Nextgenscience Assessment Information:To support teachers with being able to use the OpenSciEd instructional materials, a set of professional learning resources has been developed that accompany each unit. All of the resources can be accessed by adding them to your Google Drive or by downloading into Microsoft Office documents from the Google Drive folder using the links below. To access the student and teacher versions of these units, visit the Instructional Materials Page.Additionally, the Connecticut State Department of Education has developed NGSS interim Assessment blocks specific to the grade 6-8 grade band. These can be accessed through the CSDE Website in the Performance Office tab.ELA/Math Transferable Skills Addressed in the Course: The following Practices Venn Diagram illustrates the connections and commonalities in the major content areas. This diagram attempts to cluster practices and capacities that have similar tenets and/or significant overlaps in the student expectations. Likewise, we have placed practices and capacities within the disciplinary domains if there was not a significant overlap or relationship to another discipline. One could argue certain practices/capacities could be placed in other positions within the Venn diagram. These placements are not definitive and the intention of the standards documents may not have conceptualized the three disciplinary areas In this manner. ​​

Oh, no! I’ve dropped my phone! Most of us have experienced the panic of watching our phones slip out of our hands and fall to the floor. We’ve experienced the relief of picking up an undamaged phone and the frustration of the shattered screen. This common experience anchors learning in the Contact Forces unit as students explore a variety of phenomena to figure out, “Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?”Student questions about the factors that result in a shattered cell phone screen lead them to investigate what is really happening to any object during a collision. They make their thinking visible with free-body diagrams, mathematical models, and system models to explain the effects of relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions. Students then use what they have learned about collisions to engineer something that will protect a fragile object from damage in a collision. They investigate which materials to use, gather design input from stakeholders to refine the criteria and constraints, develop micro and macro models of how their solution is working, and optimize their solution based on data from investigations. Finally, students apply what they have learned from the investigation and design to a related design problem.

In this unit, students develop ideas related to how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance. Their investigations are motivated by trying to account for a perplexing anchoring phenomenon — a truck is playing loud music in a parking lot and the windows of a building across the parking lot visibly shake in response to the music.They make observations of sound sources to revisit the K–5 idea that objects vibrate when they make sounds. They figure out that patterns of differences in those vibrations are tied to differences in characteristics of the sounds being made. They gather data on how objects vibrate when making different sounds to characterize how a vibrating object’s motion is tied to the loudness and pitch of the sounds they make. Students also conduct experiments to support the idea that sound needs matter to travel through, and they will use models and simulations to explain how sound travels through matter at the particle level.

This unit launches with a slow-motion video of a speaker as it plays music. In the previous unit, students developed a model of sound. This unit allows students to investigate the cause of a speaker’s vibration in addition to the effect.Students dissect speakers to explore the inner workings, and engineer homemade cup speakers to manipulate the parts of the speaker. They identify that most speakers have the same parts–a magnet, a coil of wire, and a membrane. Students investigate each of these parts to figure out how they work together in the speaker system. Along the way, students manipulate the components (e.g. changing the strength of the magnet, number of coils, direction of current) to see how this technology can be modified and applied to a variety of contexts, like MagLev trains, junkyard magnets, and electric motors.

Humans have always been driven by noticing, recording, and understanding patterns and by trying to figure out how we fit within much larger systems. In this unit, students begin observing the repeating biannual pattern of the Sun setting perfectly aligned between buildings in New York City along particular streets and then try to explain additional patterns in the sky that they and others have observed. Students draw on their own experiences and the stories of family or community members to brainstorm a list of patterns in the sky. And listen to a series of podcasts highlighting indigenous astronomies from around the world that emphasize how patterns in the sky set the rhythms for their lives, their communities, and all life on Earth, and these are added to their growing list of related phenomena (other patterns in the sky people have observed).In the first two lesson sets (Lessons 1–5 and 6–7), students develop models for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Sun-Moon systems that explain some of the patterns in the sky that they have identified, including seasons, eclipses, and lunar phases. In the third lesson set (Lessons 8–12), students investigate a series of related phenomena motivated by their questions and ideas for investigations. In the final lesson set (Lessons 13–17), students explore the remaining questions on their Driving Question Board, related to planets and other objects farther out in space (beyond the stars they can see with the unaided eye).

This unit on genetics starts out with students noticing and wondering about photos of two cattle, one of whom has significantly more muscle than the other. The students then observe photos of other animals with similar differences in musculature: dogs, fish, rabbits, and mice. After developing initial models for the possible causes of these differences in musculature, students explore a collection of photos showing a range of visible differences.In the first lesson set, students use videos, photos, data sets, and readings to investigate what causes an animal to get extra-big muscles. Students figure out how muscles typically develop as a result of environmental factors such as exercise and diet. Then, students work with cattle pedigrees, including data about chromosomes and proteins, to figure out genetic factors that influence the heavily muscled phenotype and explore selective breeding in cattle. In the second lesson set, students use what they’ve learned from explaining cattle musculature to help them explain other trait variations they’ve seen. They investigate plant reproduction, including selective breeding and asexual reproduction (in plants and other organisms) and other examples of traits that are influenced by genetic and environmental factors. Students figure out that environmental and genetic factors together play a role in the differences we see among living things.