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Print Benchmark
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A. The Universe
By the end of 5th grade, students should know that:
- The patterns of stars in the sky stay the same, although they appear to move across the sky nightly, and different stars can be seen in different seasons.
- Telescopes magnify the appearance of some distant objects in the sky, including the moon and the planets.
- Planets change their positions against the background of stars.
- The earth is one of several planets that orbit the sun, and the moon orbits around the earth.
- Stars are like the sun, some being smaller and some larger, but so far away that they look like points of light.
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B. The Earth
By the end of 5th grade, students should know that:
- Things on or near the earth are pulled toward it by the earth's gravity.
- Like all planets and stars, the earth is approximately spherical in shape.
- When liquid water disappears, it turns into a gas (vapor) in the air and can reappear as a liquid when cooled, or as a solid if cooled below the freezing point of water.
- Air is a substance that surrounds us, takes up space, and whose movement we feel as wind.
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C. Processes that Shape the Earth
By the end of 5th grade, students should know that:
- Waves, wind, water, and ice shape and reshape the earth's land surface by eroding rock and soil in some areas and depositing them in other areas, sometimes in seasonal layers.
- Rock is composed of different combinations of minerals.
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D. The Structure of Matter
By the end of 5th grade, students should know that:
- Heating and cooling cause changes in the properties of materials.
- No matter how parts of an object are assembled, the weight of the whole object made is always the same as the sum of the parts; and when a thing is broken into parts, the parts have the same total weight as the original thing.
- Materials may be composed of parts that are too small to be seen without magnification.
- When a new material is made by combining two or more materials, it has properties that are different from the original materials.
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E. Energy Transformations
By the end of 5th grade, students should know that:
- Things that give off light often also give off heat.
- When warmer things are put with cooler ones, the warm ones lose heat and the cool ones gain it until they are all at the same temperature.
- Some materials conduct heat much better than others.
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F. Motion
By the end of 5th grade, students should know that:
- Changes in speed or direction of motion are caused by forces.
- How fast things move differs greatly.
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G. Forces of Nature
By the end of 5th grade, students should know that:
- The earth's gravity pulls any object toward it without touching it.
- Without touching them, a magnet pulls on all things made of iron and either pushes or pulls on other magnets.
- Without touching them, material that has been electrically charged pulls on all other materials and may either push or pull other charged materials.
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