Texas TEKS 4.8.A
The Standard
describe ways people have adapted to and modified their environment in Texas, past and present, such as timber clearing, agricultural production, wetlands drainage, energy production, and construction of dams
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students identify how Texans respond to land, water, climate, and natural resources. They explain what people changed, why they changed it, and how life or the environment was affected.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Students can classify a Texas example as adapting to conditions or changing the surroundings. They can compare a past example with a present example and support their thinking with details.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may treat adaptation and modification as the same idea. They may also assume human changes are always helpful or confuse human actions with natural events.
How to Assess It
- Give students images of a dam and a house built on raised supports. Ask them to label each as adaptation or modification and explain why.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give groups Texas landscape cards and craft materials, then have them build and label one human response to each landscape.
Ask students to write: How can changing the environment solve one problem but create another? Use a Texas example.
Play a sorting relay with cards showing irrigation, dams, raised homes, timber clearing, wetlands drainage, and wind farms.
Examine a local road, reservoir, farm, or energy site, then identify why people built it and how it changed the area.
Free download
Printable 4.8.A Worksheet
A ready-to-print activity worksheet aligned to 4.8.A, with an answer key for the teacher on its own page. No account needed.
PDF, US Letter, prints cleanly in black and white.
Download the worksheetKeep exploring
Related Standards
- 2.5.A
identify ways in which people have modified the physical environment such as clearing land, building roads, using land for agriculture, and drilling for oil;
- 7.9.A
identify ways in which Texans have adapted to and modified the environment and explain the positive and negative consequences of the modifications; and
- 4.8.C
compare the positive and negative consequences of human modification of the environment in Texas, past and present.
- 4.8.B
explain reasons why people have adapted to and modified their environment in Texas, past and present, such as the use of natural resources to meet basic needs, ...
Turn this exact standard into a lesson
Grade, subject, topic, and the complete standard are prefilled. Create one free, no account needed.
Also for this standard:Make a WorksheetMake a QuizMake a Sub Lesson