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On December 3, 2025, STEAM in Action had its fourth of five sessions with students at Rice Intermediate School in San Carlos, AZ. The STEAM Team spent 45 minutes facilitating inquiry-based learning and hands-on activities with each 5th-grade class (5 total).
The session was developed to align with Arizona’s 5th-Grade Science Standards - 1) 5.L3U1.9: Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about patterns between the offspring of plants and the offspring of animals (including humans); construct an explanation of how genetic information is passed from one generation to the next. And 2) 5.L3U1.10: Construct an explanation based on evidence that changes in an environment can affect the development of traits in a population of organisms. These standards guide students' learning on inheritance, traits, and adaptations.
This session focused on exploring and interpreting maps and graphs of Arizona's different biomes and annual precipitation. Arizona Project Wet’s 2025-2026 Water Festival Unit Slides 13-16 were used. In small groups, students were given hard copies of the slides, 1 at a time, to have a meaningful discussion and review. We began by comparing the total land area to the total water area of Arizona (slide 16). This allowed for conversation around groundwater and aquifers. Next, students interpreted a map of annual precipitation and compared it to the first aquifer map (slide 15). They drew conclusions about the correlation of annual precipitation to aquifers in the state. While reviewing the annual precipitation map, students were prompted to consider the different types of living organisms in these areas. Do they all have the same needs, or do they differ based on water availability? This led us to explore adaptations based on the physical environment (slides 13-14). Finally, students were challenged to categorize adaptations into physiological, structural, or behavioral.