Mission Library

The Abyss (3rd)

Traits of Organisms and Paragraph Writing
3rd Grade

The Mission

49 min

Storyline

The crew embarks on a groundbreaking journey to the unexplored Abyssal Zone of Tellenor’s ocean to study its bizarre deep-sea creatures.

The crew of the UCS Infini-D dives into an ambitious exploration of Tellenor’s Abyssal Zone, a mysterious region over 23,000 feet beneath the ocean. This unprecedented Mission tasks the crew...

3-Dimensional Science

Phenomenon

Sea creatures in the Abyssal Zone have unique adaptations that help them survive and thrive in a harsh environment.

Science and Engineering Practices

Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions

  • Construct an explanation of observed relationships.

  • Use evidence to construct or support an explanation or design a solution to a problem.

  • Identify the evidence that supports particular points in an explanation.

Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information

  • Read and comprehend grade-appropriate complex texts and/or other reliable media to summarize and obtain scientific and technical ideas and describe how they are supported by evidence.

  • Compare and/or combine across complex texts and/or other reliable media to support the engagement in other scientific and/or engineering practices.

  • Communicate scientific and/or technical information orally and/or in written formats.

Crosscutting Concepts

Cause and Effect

  • Students routinely identify and test causal relationships and use these relationships to explain change. They understand events that occur together with regularity might or might not signify a cause and effect relationship.

Disciplinary Core Ideas

LS3.B: Variation of Traits

  • Different organisms vary in how they look and function because they have different inherited information; the environment also affects the traits that an organism develops.

LS3.A: Inheritance of Traits

  • Different organisms vary in how they look and function because they have different inherited information; the environment also affects the traits that an organism develops.

LS4.C: Adaptation

  • Particular organisms can only survive in particular environments. Populations of organisms live in a variety of habitats. Change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Targeted Standards

Skills in Action

Critical ThinkingCollaborationResilienceProblem SolvingInitiative