Wyoming standards alignment

• HS-ESS1-3

  Covered

  Communicate scientific ideas about the way stars, over their life cycle, produce elements.

  Covered by

  • How We Know What's Out There

  • · 7 · Reading a star: the HR diagram
  • · 13 · What stars make

  Note: Lesson 13 is this expectation. It gives the mechanism without equations (hydrogen to helium, heavier elements as the core contracts and heats, the stop at iron because fusion past it no longer releases net energy, and the extreme conditions of stellar death for what comes after), and then sets out the four independent lines of evidence that support it. Communicating the idea IS the lesson, which is why this one is full rather than partial.

• HS-ESS1-2

  Partially covered

  Construct an explanation of the Big Bang theory based on astronomical evidence of light spectra, motion of distant galaxies, and composition of matter in the universe.

  Covered by

  • How We Know What's Out There

  • · 5 · Light itself
  • · 11 · Redshift and an expanding universe
  • · 12 · The Hubble tension
  • · 16 · Capstone: trace a number down the ladder

  What we do and don't cover: The strongest CONTENT match in this catalog: the performance expectation names light spectra, the motion of distant galaxies, and the composition of matter, and those are lessons 5, 11 and 13 of How We Know What's Out There. PARTIAL, and the missing piece is the practice rather than the content: the course supplies and examines the evidence, and the student is asked to construct an explanation only in the graded capstone, where they trace a published number down the chain of inference. If your science requirement is assessed on the three-dimensional NGSS performance, this contributes to it and does not discharge it.

• HS-ESS1-1

  Partially covered

  Develop a model based on evidence to illustrate the life span of the sun and the role of nuclear fusion in the sun's core to release energy that eventually reaches Earth in the form of radiation.

  Covered by

  • How We Know What's Out There

  • · 7 · Reading a star: the HR diagram
  • · 13 · What stars make

  What we do and don't cover: PARTIAL, and the gap is the verb. Fusion as the sun's energy source and the arc of a star's life are taught (lessons 7 and 13, via the main sequence and stellar evolution), but the student never DEVELOPS A MODEL, which is the performance the expectation actually requires. Do not round this up.

What we don't claim

A standards page is only worth reading if the omissions are honest too. We looked at these and left them out:

• Mathematics — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Wyoming Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Wyoming's 2016 Science standards are built on the NGSS, so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. There is no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• The Wind River / tribal-sovereignty sub-benchmarks (every .a code). Wyoming's social-studies standards are saturated with Indian Education for All: SS12.1.1.a (comparing tribal-member and citizen rights on the Wind River Indian Reservation), SS12.1.3.a (governance of the Indigenous Tribes of Wyoming through Congressional Acts and Supreme Court decisions — the Marshall Trilogy, U.S. v. Shoshone Tribe of Indians), SS12.1.5.a (the inherent powers of Wyoming's tribes), SS12.2.1.a-2.4.a, SS12.4.1.a/4.4.a/4.5.a, and SS12.5.2.a/5.3.a. These are specific, sovereign, Wyoming-tribal content — the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, treaties, boarding schools, land cessions — that this catalog does not teach. We claim none of them.
• Standard 2 — Culture and Cultural Diversity — nothing. SS12.2.1-2.2.4 ask students to analyze how groups meet human needs and express culture, and to evaluate cultural assimilation and preservation in Wyoming, the United States, and the world — the standard is anchored in Wyoming's own and Indigenous cultural life. The catalog does not teach this, so we claim no Standard 2 benchmark.
• SS12.1.4 — the U.S. civil and criminal legal systems. SS12.1.4 asks students to demonstrate an understanding of, and distinguish between, the United States civil and criminal legal systems at the federal, state, and tribal levels. The Civics courses teach jury service and the judiciary's structure, but not the civil-vs-criminal-systems distinction the standard names, so we do not claim it.
• The economics and history benchmarks we checked and rejected. SS12.3.4 (how financial and government institutions make economic decisions — banking, investment, credit, regulation, debt; the catalog teaches no financial literacy), SS12.3.5 (how values and beliefs influence micro/macroeconomic decisions), and SS12.4.3 (given a current event, critique the actors and hypothesize how it would have played out in another country — not this catalog's method) are not genuinely taught, so we do not claim them.
• SS12.5.3 and SS12.6.3 — sense of place, and digital production. SS12.5.3 asks how conflict, demographics, movement, trade, and technology affect humans' “sense of place” — the catalog teaches trade and movement, but not sense of place as the geographic object of study, so we do not claim it. SS12.6.3 (use digital tools to research, design, and present social studies concepts, per the ISTE student standards) is a production standard the catalog does not deliver.
• Wyoming's own state structure is taught more fully than any one code captures. Wyoming Civics teaches the 1889 constitution's equal-political-rights founding, the five-officer plural executive with no lieutenant governor (the Secretary of State succeeds the Governor), the part-time citizen Legislature and its short biennial sessions, the absence of a state income tax, the Missouri-Plan judiciary, direct democracy with high thresholds, and the 23 counties — from Wyoming's own sources. SS12.1.5 (structures of both constitutions) hosts most of it, but the succession quirk, the no-income-tax fact, and the initiative's high thresholds have no code of their own.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Wyoming's other frameworks (Computer Science, World Languages) have not been fetched and verified against these courses yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Wyoming claims this pass.