What does a student learn in StateNorth Carolina,GradeGrade 5,SubjectScience?

Students learn how matter and energy work together to cause changes, like heat melting ice or electricity lighting a bulb. The focus is on what happens to materials when energy acts on them.

Students weigh objects before and after mixing, burning, or breaking them apart to see whether the total weight changes. This builds the idea that matter doesn't just disappear when it changes form.

Students mix substances together, like vinegar and baking soda, and record what happens. They look for signs that a new substance formed, such as a color change, gas bubbles, or heat.

Students heat and cool different materials to see how each one changes, then connect those changes to why the material is used that way in real life.

Pushing, pulling, and gravity are forces that make objects start, stop, or change direction. Students learn how the size and direction of a force change the way something moves.

Students test how gravity, friction, and heavier or lighter objects change the way things move. They run hands-on investigations and use what they find to explain why objects speed up, slow down, or change direction.

Students use numbers and calculations to figure out where a moving object is, which way it's heading, and how fast it's going.

Students learn how the body's major systems, like the heart, lungs, and digestive tract, each handle a specific job and work together to keep a person alive.

Students learn that the human body is built in layers: cells group into tissues, tissues form organs, organs work together as systems, and systems make up the whole body.

Students use diagrams and models to compare the major systems inside the human body, such as the digestive and circulatory systems, and explain what each one does to keep the body alive.

Plants and animals in an ecosystem depend on each other to survive. Students learn how removing one species, like a plant or predator, can change the whole community around it.

Students compare ecosystems like oceans, forests, and lakes to explain which conditions help more plants and animals survive. They use evidence to argue why some ecosystems support a wider variety of living things than others.

Students sort living things into three roles: plants that make their own food, animals that eat other organisms, and decomposers like fungi that break down dead matter. They use diagrams or models to show how each role keeps the ecosystem running.

Students use food web diagrams to figure out what happens when one plant or animal in an ecosystem disappears. They trace how that change ripples through other living things that depend on it.

Some traits, like eye color or fur pattern, are passed down from parents. Others, like a scar or a learned skill, come from what happens during an organism's life.

Students compare two kinds of behavior: what an animal is born knowing how to do, like a spider spinning a web, and what it picks up from experience, like a dog learning to sit.

Students compare traits they are born with (like eye color or hair texture) to traits they develop over time (like a scar or a learned skill). They practice asking questions to tell the difference between the two.

Students learn how the ocean and the air work together to create weather patterns and shape the climate of different regions.

Students read weather data across days and seasons to spot patterns, like why winter mornings are colder or why spring brings more rain. They look at temperature, wind, and precipitation records to explain how weather shifts over time.

Students read real weather data, like temperature readings and wind speeds, to explain what the weather is doing now and predict what's coming next, including storms like hurricanes and tornadoes.

Students explain how the ocean shapes North Carolina's weather and climate. They look at how water temperature, currents, and moisture from the sea affect rainfall and seasonal patterns along the coast and inland.

Students use diagrams or models to show how heat from the sun moves water from the ground and plants into the air, then back down as rain or snow.