Are you looking for fun and engaging activities to help your 3rd graders learn about life cycles and traits? Do you want to bring plant and animal life cycles, inherited traits, and advantages for survival together in an enjoyable way? Then we have just the activities to help you do that!
In this blog post, we will share various activities students can use explore life cycles, examine the advantages some organisms have for survival, and discover how plants, animals and people inherit traits! Bring hard concepts to life in a kid-friendly way with the activities in this unit!
Learn About Plant and Animal Life Cycles

To kick off this unit, students will study plant and animal life cycles and how they all have similar characteristics (birth, growth, reproduction, death). Use the mini books to teach your students about the similarities between all animal life cycles and all plant life cycles. Create a spinning wheel to study the life cycle of an apple and a frog. Interactive notebook pages are included, as well as puzzles, and a nonfiction reading passage about the life cycle penguins!
Discover Inherited Traits

To start this section of the unit, students will learn what it means to inherit a trait. Posters help bring this concept to life. Your students will enjoy learning about inherited vs. acquired traits. There’s plenty to teach about traits! From puzzles to practice pages, to hands-on activities you’ll have no trouble teaching this standard!
Learn About Environmental Influences on Traits

Learn how the environment can influence traits! With the kid-friendly materials in the third part of the life cycles unit, students will learn about various influences on traits. What happens when a caterpillar is born on an unhealthy plant? What happens to sea turtle population when there is an increase in fox population?
Study Advantages for Survival
In the final part of this unit, students will learn about characteristics that provide plants and animals advantages for survival. Through posters, worksheets, a mini book, and hands-on activities, your students will be able to understand these hard concepts.

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