I really thought when I read this standard that it was kind of a joke. In my head, I thought “Ok, fancy wording for common sense”. Not really. It actually baffled me that some of the kids did not really grasp this concept. They also started confusing living and non-living with natural and man-made.
I did find a couple of books that I was able to use to introduce and talk about this standard.
Guess what? There’s not a plethora of options on this topic.
I will tell you something that was very meaningful for my kids. If you have google then you are good to go 🙂 Just start typing in things like “The Grand Canyon”,  “Niagara Falls”, and “Mt. Everest”. A lot of them have never seen pictures of these incredible land forms. I could tell that it stuck with them more when they saw pictures of natural land forms.
A few activities that we have done from this unit were the emergent reader, circle map, and natural vs. man-made sort. I am going to keep the other activities on the shelf to go back and review. I can tell that it’s one of those standards that is going to trip them up because of the vocabulary of it.
For the emergent reader, I had students highlight the picture word and the word “natural” or “man-made”.
I also used these posters and referred back to them often. Click on the pictures to snag them.
You can find these activities plus some in this science unit:
