Build-A-Fish: Educational Standards

Educational Standards - For Teachers and Parents

This "Build-a-Fish" activity is an adaptation of the activity It Takes All Kinds from the 4th grade MARE Teachers Guide to Kelp Forests. Both the original activity and this interactive, online game reinforce the key concept that fish come in a great array of forms, colors and shapes which can be used to predict the habitat and lifestyle to which they are adapted.

These activities are aligned with the National Science Education Standards (from the National Academy of Sciences) for grades K-4 Life Science:

Each plant and animal has different structures that serve different functions in growth, survival, and reproduction.
An organism's patterns of behavior are related to the nature of that organism's environment, including the kinds and numbers of other organism's present, the availability of food and resources, and the physical characteristics of the environment.

They are similarly aligned with the California Academic Standards for 4th grade Life Sciences education:

for any particular environment, some kinds of plants and animals survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
ecosystems can be characterized in terms of their living and nonliving components.

as well as 4th grade standards on Investigation and Experimentation:

formulate predictions and justify predictions based on cause and effect relationships.
conduct multiple trials to test a prediction and draw conclusions about the relationships between results and predictions.