Performance Expectation
K-ESS3-1. Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants or animals (including humans) and the places they live.
Clarification Statement: Examples of relationships could include that deer eat buds and leaves, therefore, they usually live in or near forests; and that grasses need sunlight so they often grow in meadows. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.
Assessment Boundary: Assessment does not include the needs and environments of microorganisms.
General Overview
Every living thing on Earth – from the tiniest fern to the blue whale to a kindergarten student – depends on the natural world for the resources it needs to survive. Water, sunlight, air, food, and shelter are not human inventions; they are gifts of Earth’s systems, available in different amounts and forms in different places. Understanding this basic dependence is the foundation of environmental literacy.
K-ESS3-1 asks students to do something sophisticated in a developmentally accessible way: build a model of the relationship between an organism and its environment. This model can be a drawing, a diagram, a physical diorama, or even a dramatic performance – what matters is that it shows the connection between what a living thing needs and where it lives.
This standard sits at the intersection of life science (what living things need) and earth and space science (what the Earth provides). It introduces the concept of a system – plants, animals, and the places they live interact as a system, where changes in one part affect others. This systems thinking is one of the most important conceptual tools in science education and begins to develop in earnest here.
The emphasis on humans in this standard is particularly important. Students are living things with the same basic needs as other animals – food, water, shelter, air. Understanding that humans get these resources from the natural world (not just from stores and houses) is a critical insight for future environmental stewardship. Where does our water come from? Where does our food grow? What materials make up our homes? These questions connect students to Earth’s systems in personally meaningful ways.
Scope and Sequence
What Comes Before
Students enter kindergarten knowing that they need food and water to survive. Many have some experience with gardens, pets, or natural settings that has given them informal knowledge about animal needs and habitats. Most, however, have not made explicit connections between the natural resources that Earth provides and the specific places where particular organisms can thrive.
At This Grade Level
Students develop explicit understanding that:
- Different plants and animals need different specific things from their environment.
- Organisms tend to live where their needs can be met.
- Humans are living things with the same basic resource needs as other animals.
- The places where organisms live (habitats) provide the resources those organisms need.
- A model can show these relationships visually.
What Comes After
In grades 2-5, students investigate more complex ecological relationships, including food webs, energy transfer, and the role of decomposers. They examine how environmental changes affect organisms (4-LS1, 5-LS2). In middle school, students model ecosystem dynamics quantitatively and examine the cycling of matter and flow of energy through ecosystems. In high school, students apply this understanding to analysis of biodiversity, conservation, and sustainability challenges. The conceptual foundation – organisms depend on their environment for resources – is first built explicitly here in kindergarten.
What Students Must Understand
Basic Needs of Living Things
- Plants need: sunlight (for photosynthesis), water, air (carbon dioxide), and nutrients from soil. They make their own food using sunlight.
- Animals need: food (they cannot make their own – they must eat plants or other animals), water, air (oxygen), and shelter from extreme conditions.
- Humans need: the same basic things as other animals – food, water, air, shelter – plus additional social and psychological needs (not the focus here).
Habitat and Resource Availability
- Different places on Earth provide different resources, which is why different organisms live in different places.
- An organism’s habitat is the specific environment where it can find everything it needs to survive: food, water, shelter, and appropriate temperature/climate conditions.
- When an organism’s needs match the resources available in a place, that organism can live and thrive there. When they don’t match, the organism cannot survive there.
The Earth as Provider of Resources
- All of the resources that living things need – water, food, air, materials for shelter – ultimately come from the natural world, from Earth’s systems.
- Humans also depend on Earth’s resources, even if we have transformed those resources into things that don’t look natural (a house is made from wood and minerals; food in a store was grown somewhere in soil with sunlight and water).
Key Vocabulary
Natural resource, habitat, environment, needs, survive, shelter, sunlight, nutrients, soil, model, relationship, system, organism, plant, animal, human.
Lesson Ideas and Activities
Activity 1: What Does It Need? Sorting Activity
Overview: Students are given picture cards showing different organisms (a cactus, a polar bear, a salmon, a sunflower, a deer, a human child) and a set of “needs” cards (water, sunlight, food, shelter, soil, cold temperature, warm temperature). Students match needs to organisms.
Discussion: “What does a cactus need that a salmon doesn’t? What do all of these living things have in common? What would happen to a polar bear if it lived in the desert?”
Extension: After sorting, students sort the organisms by habitat: desert, ocean, forest, grassland, tundra, city/suburb. Ask: “Does the habitat match the needs of the organism living there?”
Activity 2: Habitat Diorama Models
Overview: Students (individually or in small groups) create a simple diorama representing one habitat (ocean, forest, desert, grassland) and include at least two organisms that live there along with representations of the resources those organisms need.
Materials: Shoeboxes or small cardboard boxes; construction paper; clay or playdough; magazines for cutting; natural materials (sand, soil, small rocks, dried leaves).
Model Labels: Students label each resource in their diorama: “water,” “sunlight,” “food,” “shelter.” They can draw arrows showing which organism uses which resource.
Sharing: Each group presents their diorama to the class and explains: “This is a ___ habitat. This organism lives here because it needs ___ and the habitat provides ___.”
Activity 3: Tracing Human Resources Back to Earth
Overview: Show students pictures of common human products and trace them back to their natural source: a wooden pencil → a tree → a forest; a glass of water → a tap → a reservoir → a lake or river → rainfall; a slice of bread → a wheat plant → a farm field → soil and sunlight.
Discussion: “Where did each of these things originally come from? Could we have any of these things without the Earth? What natural resources do humans depend on every single day?”
Art Connection: Students create a simple “from Earth to me” diagram for one resource they use daily.
Activity 4: Go Outside and Find It!
Overview: Take students outside to the schoolyard or a nearby park. Give each student a simple observation sheet with pictures representing the basic needs (water, sunlight, food, shelter). Students look for evidence of each need being met in the outdoor environment.
Focus Questions: “Where would a bird find food here? Where would a worm find water? Where would an insect find shelter? Where would a plant get sunlight?”
Recording: Students draw or tally what they find. Back inside, compile results as a class.
Activity 5: The Needs Web
Overview: In a circle, students represent different organisms and the resources they need. Using a ball of yarn, connect organisms to resources and to each other to create a visible “web” of relationships in an ecosystem.
Learning Goal: Students viscerally experience the interconnectedness of a system – pulling on one part affects the whole web.
Discussion after one student “drops out”: “What happens to the web if the water disappears? If the plants disappear? If the insects disappear?”
Common Student Misconceptions
Misconception 1: “Plants don’t need food – only animals do.”
What students think: Children often believe that plants don’t eat because plants don’t have mouths or digestive systems. They may know plants need water and sunlight, but not recognize that plants make their own food through photosynthesis.
How to address it: Explain: “Plants make their own food using sunlight, water, and air – they are like little food-making factories! Animals cannot do this – they have to eat plants or other animals to get their food.” Demonstrate this with a simple photosynthesis explanation: sunlight + water + air → food (sugar) + oxygen. This is not fully developed until grade 5, but planting the conceptual seed here is appropriate.
Misconception 2: “Humans don’t really depend on nature because we get things from stores.”
What students think: Urban and suburban children in particular may have very limited experience with where food, water, and building materials come from. They may genuinely believe that food “comes from the store” with no connection to natural processes.
How to address it: The “trace it back to Earth” activity (above) directly addresses this. Visit a garden or farm if possible, or watch video footage of where various products originate. Ask: “What would happen if there was no more soil? No more rain? No more sunlight?”
Misconception 3: “All animals need the same things in the same amounts.”
What students think: While students can agree that all animals need water and food, they often don’t appreciate that different species have very different requirements. A camel can go weeks without water; a river otter needs water constantly. A polar bear needs extreme cold; a lizard needs intense heat.
How to address it: Use contrasting examples from very different habitats. Ask: “Would a polar bear be happy in the Sahara Desert? Why not? What does the desert have too much of? Too little of?” This introduces the critical concept of habitat specificity.
Misconception 4: “Shelter means only a house for humans.”
What students think: The word “shelter” is often understood narrowly as a house or building. Students may not recognize that a hollow log, a burrow, a nest, a cave, or even a rock crevice all serve as shelter for different animals.
How to address it: Broaden the definition: “Shelter is anything that protects a living thing from danger, extreme weather, or predators. What kinds of ‘houses’ do different animals live in?” Create a chart: animal → type of shelter.
Misconception 5: “Animals choose to live wherever they want.”
What students think: Young children often attribute human-like agency to animals, imagining that a penguin “chose” to live in Antarctica or that a rainforest frog “decided” to live in the rain forest.
How to address it: Reframe in terms of needs and survival: “Penguins can survive in Antarctica because their bodies are designed to handle the cold and they can find the fish they need to eat there. If a penguin was in a hot desert, it couldn’t find its food and its body would overheat. Animals live where they can survive – where their needs are met.”
Assessment Questions
Basic Needs and Habitats
- What does a plant need to survive? What does an animal need to survive? What do you need to survive?
- Why do fish live in water and not on land? What does water provide for a fish that land cannot?
- A polar bear lives in the Arctic where it is very cold and icy. What does the Arctic provide that the polar bear needs? Could a polar bear survive in a hot desert? Why or why not?
Models and Relationships
- (Student shows their diorama or diagram) Explain your model. Show me one organism in your habitat. What does it need? Where does it get what it needs in this habitat?
- Draw a picture showing where a bee gets the things it needs to survive. Label at least two different resources in your drawing.
Human Dependence on Natural Resources
- Where does your drinking water come from? How does it get to your house?
- Where does your food come from? Can you trace your lunch back to a plant or animal that got things from the Earth?
- Are humans different from other animals because we live in houses and wear clothes? Do we still need the same basic things as a deer or a bird? Explain.
Systems Thinking
- What would happen to the animals in a forest if all the water dried up? Why?
- Why do you think scientists say plants, animals, and the place they live make up a “system”? What does “system” mean to you?
Cross-Curricular Connections
Life Science (LS1.C)
The needs of organisms and how they survive connects directly to LS1.C (Organization for Matter and Energy Flow in Organisms) developed more fully in grades 3–5. The K-ESS3-1 understanding of resource needs seeds the later conceptual development of food webs, photosynthesis, and matter cycling.
Social Studies
Natural resources are a central concept in elementary social studies curricula. How do communities depend on local natural resources? How do different communities around the world interact with different environments? What happens when natural resources are scarce? These questions bridge science and social studies meaningfully.
ELA / Informational Text
Students read and discuss informational texts about specific animals and their habitats. CCSS ELA standards around key ideas and details in informational text (RI.K.1, RI.K.2) are directly developed through this science content.
Health
Students’ personal need for clean water, nutritious food, fresh air, and safe shelter connects to health curriculum. “We are living things with the same basic needs as other animals” is a powerful, unifying idea for early childhood health education.
Teacher Background Knowledge
The Three Categories of Natural Resources: (1) Renewable resources – resources that can be replenished by natural processes (sunlight, wind, fresh water via the water cycle, living organisms via reproduction). (2) Nonrenewable resources – resources that form very slowly or not at all on human timescales (fossil fuels, many minerals). (3) Inexhaustible resources – resources that human use cannot meaningfully deplete (sunlight at its source, tidal energy). At kindergarten, the formal classification isn’t the focus – simply recognizing that living things need specific things from the environment is the goal.
Habitat vs. Ecosystem: A habitat is the specific type of environment where a particular species lives (a beaver’s habitat is a freshwater stream or pond; a barn owl’s habitat is open farmland). An ecosystem is the complete system of living and nonliving components in an area – all the organisms plus the water, soil, air, and energy that connect them. Ecosystems typically contain many different habitats. At kindergarten, the word “habitat” is most appropriate; “ecosystem” will develop formally in later grades.
Basic Animal Needs – The FAWNS Framework: Food, Air, Water, Nutrients (for plants: minerals from soil), Shelter. Some add Space (territory) and appropriate Temperature. Understanding which components of the environment provide each need helps teachers guide student discussion precisely.
Photosynthesis (simplified): Plants use the energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide (from the air) and water into glucose (sugar, their food) and oxygen. This is why plants need sunlight and water. They are autotrophs – self-feeders. Animals are heterotrophs – they must obtain energy by eating other organisms.