Explore Your Backyard

K-12 Florida Education Standards

The following standards are focused by suggested grade levels and aligned to Florida Department of Education benchmarks.

• 3rd Grade

  SC.3.N.1.1: Raise questions about the natural world, investigate them individually and in teams through free exploration and systematic investigations, and generate appropriate explanations based on those explorations.

  SC.3.L.17.1: Describe how animals and plants respond to changing seasons.

  SC.3.L.15.1: Classify animals into major groups (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, arthropods, vertebrates and invertebrates, those having live births and those which lay eggs) according to their physical characteristics and behaviors. 

• 4th Grade

  SC.4.L.17.4: Recognize ways plants and animals, including humans, can impact the environment.

  SC.4.L.17.2: Explain that animals, including humans, cannot make their own food and that when animals eat plants or other animals, the energy stored in the food source is passed to them.

  SC.4.L.16.3: Recognize that animal behaviors may be shaped by heredity and learning.

• 5th Grade

  SC.5.L.14.2: Compare and contrast the function of organs and other physical structures of plants and animals, including humans, for example: some animals have skeletons for support - some with internal skeletons others with exoskeletons - while some plants have stems for support.

  SC.5.L.17.1: Compare and contrast adaptations displayed by animals and plants that enable them to survive in different environments such as life cycles variations, animal behaviors and physical characteristics.

  SC.5.L.15.1: Describe how, when the environment changes, differences between individuals allow some plants and animals to survive and reproduce while others die or move to new locations. 

• 6th Grade

  SC.6.N.1.3: Explain the difference between an experiment and other types of scientific investigation, and explain the relative benefits and limitations of each.

  SC.6.N.1.5: Recognize that science involves creativity, not just in designing experiments, but also in creating explanations that fit evidence.

  SC.6.L.15.1: Analyze and describe how and why organisms are classified according to shared characteristics with emphasis on the Linnaean system combined with the concept of Domains.

• 7th Grade

  SC.7.L.15.2: Explore the scientific theory of evolution by recognizing and explaining ways in which genetic variation and environmental factors contribute to evolution by natural selection and diversity of organisms.

  SC.7.L.17.1: Explain and illustrate the roles of and relationships among producers, consumers, and decomposers in the process of energy transfer in a food web.

  SC.7.L.17.3: Describe and investigate various limiting factors in the local ecosystem and their impact on native populations, including food, shelter, water, space, disease, parasitism, predation, and nesting sites.

• 8th Grade

  SC.8.N.1.6: Understand that scientific investigations involve the collection of relevant empirical evidence, the use of logical reasoning, and the application of imagination in devising hypotheses, predictions, explanations and models to make sense of the collected evidence.

  SC.8.N.4.1: Explain that science is one of the processes that can be used to inform decision making at the community, state, national, and international levels.

  SC.8.N.4.2: Explain how political, social, and economic concerns can affect science, and vice versa.

• 9th-12th Grade

  SC.912.L.14.6: Explain the significance of genetic factors, environmental factors, and pathogenic agents to health from the perspectives of both individual and public health.

  SC.912.L.15.1: Explain how the scientific theory of evolution is supported by the fossil record, comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, biogeography, molecular biology, and observed evolutionary change.

  SC.912.L.15.4: Describe how and why organisms are hierarchically classified and based on evolutionary relationships.

  SC.912.L.15.6: Discuss distinguishing characteristics of the domains and kingdoms of living organisms.

  SC.912.L.17.1: Discuss the characteristics of populations, such as number of individuals, age structure, density, and pattern of distribution.

  SC.912.L.17.2: Explain the general distribution of life in aquatic systems as a function of chemistry, geography, light, depth, salinity, and temperature.

  SC.912.L.17.3: Discuss how various oceanic and freshwater processes, such as currents, tides, and waves, affect the abundance of aquatic organisms.

  SC.912.L.17.4: Describe changes in ecosystems resulting from seasonal variations, climate change and succession.

  SC.912.N.4.1: Explain how scientific knowledge and reasoning provide an empirically-based perspective to inform society's decision making.

  SC.912.N.4.2: Weigh the merits of alternative strategies for solving a specific societal problem by comparing a number of different costs and benefits, such as human, economic, and environmental.