Science 3

Biodiversity means the variety of different types of living things — plants, animals, and fungi — sharing the same ecosystem.

Local First Peoples understand that living things (plants, animals) and non-living things (water, soil, air) in an ecosystem are all interconnected — a change to one part affects the others.

A local environment (schoolyard, park, forest, pond) usually holds far more different living things than it first appears — you have to look closely.

Stewardship means the shared responsibility to care for the local environment, passed down through generations.

Living things can be sorted by their characteristics — how they look, move, or grow — to help notice how varied they are.

Every living thing needs energy to grow, move, and stay alive: producers (plants) make their own energy from sunlight; consumers (animals) get energy by eating other living things; decomposers (bacteria and fungi) get energy by breaking down dead material.

Matter is anything that has mass (it can be weighed) and takes up space (it has volume).

All matter — no matter how different it looks — is built from tiny building blocks called atoms and particles.

A food chain shows energy flowing from one living thing to another (e.g., grass to rabbit to lynx); a food web shows many food chains interconnecting (a rabbit may be eaten by a lynx or a wolf).

Matter isn't just solid things — liquids like water and gases like air are matter too, even though air is invisible.

Thermal energy (heat) is the energy that comes from the movement of particles within matter.

Conduction is heat transferring directly between two things that are touching each other.

Heat can be produced by chemical reactions (like a hand warmer), friction between moving objects (like rubbing your hands), the sun, a stove, a campfire, or even your own body.

Heat always moves from the warmer thing to the cooler thing — that's why holding an ice cube makes your hand feel cold, not the ice cube feeling 'warmer'.

Heat can come from more than one kind of source — it isn't just 'the sun' or just 'fire'.

Landforms are shapes the land takes — such as mountains, hills, plateaus, valleys, riverbeds, deltas, and glaciers.

Local First Peoples know and describe the landforms of their territory through oral narrative — stories told aloud and passed down through generations.

Erosion is when wind, water, or ice wears land away and carries material off — like a riverbank slowly wearing down.

Different local areas have different landforms nearby depending on where they are — a coastal area may have deltas, while a mountain town has peaks and valleys.

This knowledge comes from generations of living on and observing the land closely, not from written maps or textbooks.