Iowa Core Alignment with our Lessons about The Core of Iowa... Soil!

Teachers and educators attending the 2010 Teacher’s Agricultural Education Academies aligned Growing in the Garden, "Be Loyal to the Soil," 
and Where We Live: Living with the Land, "Iowa’s #1 Natural Resource" lessons with the following essential concepts and skills from the Iowa Core Curriculum.
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21st Century Skills

Civic Literacy
  • Understand the rights and responsibilities of each citizen and demonstrate the value of lifelong civic action.
  • Understand the United States has a role in current world affairs.

Employability Skills
  • Communicate and work appropriately and productively with others.
  • Recognize, adapt, adjust to various roles and responsibilities in an environment of change.
  • Learn, practice, demonstrate leadership skills, integrity, ethical behavior, social responsibility while collaborating to achieve common goals.
  • Develop and demonstrate initiative and self-direction through high achievement and life-long learning while exploring the ways individual talents and skills can be used for production outcomes in personal and professional life.
  • Demonstrate productivity and accountability by meeting high expectations.

Financial Literacy
  • Recognize the local, state, national, and international impacts of personal financial habits and actions. (Our choices have financial consequences.)

Health Literacy
  • Recognize and apply critical literacy/thinking skills related to personal, family and community wellness.
  • Demonstrate behaviors that foster healthy, active lifestyles for individuals and the benefit of society.

Technology Literacy
  • Use technology resources to create original products, identify patterns and problems, make predictions, and propose solutions.
  • Use technological resources to develop and refine questions for investigation.


Science

Science as Inquiry
  • Identify and generate questions that can be answered through scientific investigations.
  • Recognize, design and conduct different types of scientific investigations.
  • Plan and conduct scientific investigations.
  • Understand that different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of investigations.
  • Select and use appropriate tools and techniques to gather, process, analyze data technology in science inquiries.
  • Use evidence to develop reasonable explanations and predictions.
  • Formulate and revise scientific explanations and models using logic and evidence.
  • Communicate and defend scientific procedures and explanations.
  • Use appropriate safety procedures when conducting investigations.

Earth and Space Science
  • Understand and apply knowledge of earth materials.
  • Events that have repeating patterns
  • Processes and changes on or in the earth’s land, oceans, and atmosphere
  • Earth history based on physical evidence

Life Science
  • Understand and apply knowledge of environmental stewardship.
  • Demonstrate knowledge of the social and personal implications of environmental issues.

Physical Science
  • Understand and apply knowledge of observable and measurable properties of objects
  • Characteristics of liquids and solids
  • The positions and motions of objects
  • States of matter and changes in states of matter
  • Concept of conservation of mass/matter


Literacy

Reading
  • Demonstrate an understanding of written language and the relationship of letters and words to the sounds of speech.
  • Use a variety of skills and strategies to comprehend nonfiction and informational text.
  • Use a variety of strategies and skills to develop and expand reading vocabulary.

Writing
  • Use an effective writing process.
  • Use knowledge of purpose, audience, format, medium in developing written communication.
  • Apply writing strategies to communicate in a variety of genres.
  • Use writing as a tool for learning.
  • Engage in the information literacy process: access, evaluate, and communicate information and ideas.
  • Write on demand.
  • Incorporate technology as a tool to enhance writing.

Speaking
  • Produce a coherent message.
  • Consider audience and variables in the speaking situation.
  • Participate in a variety of communication situations.
  • Demonstrate control of delivery skills.
  • Recognize the roles of evaluation and response in oral communication.
  • Participate appropriately in one-on-one situations and group settings.

Listening
  • Listen for information and understanding.
  • Listen for interpretation, analysis, evaluation.
  • Listen to establish, maintain and enhance relationships.

Viewing
  • Use a range of strategies to interpret visual media.
  • Understand how literary forms can be represented in visual narratives.


Social Studies

Behavioral Sciences
  • Understand the changing nature of society.
  • Interactions between self and peer group.
  • The influences on individual and group behavior and group decision making.
  • Current social issues to determine how the individual formulates opinions and responds to issues.

Economics
  • Understand the role of scarcity and economic trade-offs and how economic conditions impact people’s lives.
  • That the basic nature of economics is an exchange of resources.
  • That people in all parts of the world trade with one another.
  • The universal economic concept of needs and wants.
  • Factors that create patterns of interdependence in the world economy.

Geography
  • Understand how geographic and human characteristics create culture and define regions.
  • Physical processes and human actions modify the environment and how the environment affects humans.
  • Physical processes and human actions shape the Earth’s surface and major ecosystems.

History
  • Understand the effects of geographic factors on historical events.
  • Understand cause and effect relationships and other historical thinking skills in order to interpret events and issues.


Mathematics

Number and Operations
  • Express numbers as equivalent representations to fluently compose and decompose numbers.
  • Understand fractional parts are equal shares or equal portions of a whole unit.
  • Develop the ability to estimate the results of computation with whole numbers, fractions, decimals and be able to judge reasonableness
  • Develop an understanding of: commonly used fractions, decimals, percents including recognizing and generating equivalent representations and fluency with addition and subtraction of fractions and decimals.

Algebra
  • Recognize, describe, create, extend repeating and growing patterns such as physical, geometric and numeric patterns and translate from one representation to another.
  • Sort, classify, and order objects by size, number and other properties.
  • Represent and analyze patterns and function, using words, tables and graphs.
  • Understand and apply proportionality.

Geometry and Measurement
Recognize and describe shapes and structures in the physical environment.
  • Compose and decompose geometric shapes,including plane and solid figures to develop a foundation for understanding area, volume, fractions, and proportions.
  • Use attributes of geometric figures to solve spatial problems.
  • Identify attributes that are measurable and use these attributes to order objects and make direct comparisons.
  • Estimate, measure and compute measurable attributes while solving problems.


Data Analysis / Statistics and Probability
  • CLL’s soil lessons aligned with 10 of these concepts and skills.

What are your conclusions about using hands-on Iowa State University Extension 4-H Curricula to implement the Iowa Core?