Michigan standards alignment

• 5-LS2-1

  Partially covered

  Develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment.

  Covered by

  • Manure and Compost

  • · 1 · What a loop is, and the two rules this course reads
  • · 9 · What composting is: carbon, nitrogen, water and air
  • · 22 · Build your own loop

  What we do and don't cover: The capstone (lesson 22, an assignment the learner submits and an instructor grades) has the learner develop exactly this model for their own ground: boxes for plants, animals, decomposers and soil, arrows labelled with the matter each carries, and the leaks out of the system. PARTIAL because the clarification statement's emphasis, that plants change matter that is not food (air, water) into food, is not taught: the course follows decomposed material back into soil and crops, not photosynthesis.

• MS-LS2-3

  Partially covered

  Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.

  Covered by

  • Manure and Compost

  • · 1 · What a loop is, and the two rules this course reads
  • · 9 · What composting is: carbon, nitrogen, water and air
  • · 22 · Build your own loop

  What we do and don't cover: Matter cycling among animals, microbes, soil and crops is taught directly, and the capstone (an instructor-graded assignment) has the learner build the model and define the boundary of their own system, as the clarification statement asks. PARTIAL because energy flow appears only as the heat a compost pile gives off; there is no treatment of energy moving through an ecosystem.

• HS-LS2-3

  Partially covered

  Construct and revise an explanation based on evidence for the cycling of matter and flow of energy in aerobic and anaerobic conditions.

  Covered by

  • Manure and Compost

  • · 9 · What composting is: carbon, nitrogen, water and air
  • · 10 · Heat, oxygen and time: the stages of a pile
  • · 12 · Turning, cold heaps, and worms

  What we do and don't cover: Composting is taught as aerobic decomposition, and the learner reads temperature evidence to tell a working aerobic pile from cold zones the NRCS composting chapter calls likely sites of anaerobic decomposition. PARTIAL because the course stops at that evidence: it does not teach aerobic or anaerobic respiration as processes (which the assessment boundary also excludes at the chemical level) and treats energy only as pile temperature.

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 Michigan Common Core (Michigan K-12) mathematics standard.
• Science: partial claims, through the shared NGSS file. Michigan adopted the NGSS verbatim as the Michigan Science Standards (November 10, 2015), so our science claims come through the shared NGSS mapping, each partial and with its limit stated on the entry; any NGSS code this state rewords or dropped is listed separately on this page. There is no laboratory work or investigation in this catalog, and we claim no more than the lessons teach.
• Michigan's World History, U.S. History, Economics, and Geography strands — deferred, not denied. The catalog's commodity, colonial, labor, civil-rights, and Cold-War history and its commodity economics WOULD map to Michigan's high-school World History (WHG), U.S. History (USHG), Economics (E), and Geography (G) strands, as they do in other states. But those strands sit in the 2019 document's multi-column, era-based layout, and the PDF's subset-font encoding makes clean verbatim transcription of that layout unreliable. Our rule is verbatim-or-nothing, so we mapped the High School Civics strand (which decoded cleanly and was verified) this pass and DEFER the other social-studies strands rather than risk citing text we cannot cleanly verify.
• C6.1.2 and C6.1.3 were rejected in July 2026 and are now CLAIMED, because the catalog changed. The 2026-07-18 pass rejected both on the ground that no course genuinely taught the expansion of citizenship or territorial representation. That was true then. `territories-and-representation` (Not a State) shipped afterward and teaches exactly this material from primary federal sources, so both codes are now claimed: C6.1.2 in full, C6.1.3 as PARTIAL because its named examples include tribal governments, which that course deliberately declines to teach. The rejection is recorded here rather than deleted, so the change is visible.
• Tribal governments (C3.2.3, C3.2.4). Michigan's C3.2 cluster names tribal governments and tribal sovereignty (C3.2.4 is entirely about it). Michigan Civics teaches Michigan's state and local structure but not tribal governments, so C3.2.3 is claimed as partial and C3.2.4 is not claimed. The gap is in the course, not the standards.
• Michigan's own state structure is taught more fully than any one code captures. Michigan Civics teaches the 1963 Constitution, the nonpartisan-ballot-but-party-nominated Supreme Court, the joint-ticket Lieutenant Governor with a separately elected Secretary of State and Attorney General, term limits (Proposal 1 of 2022), and the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission — from Michigan's own sources. C3.2.3 (how state/local governments are organized) and C3.2.6 (initiative/referendum/recall) host most of it, but the judicial-selection quirk and the redistricting commission's design have no code of their own beyond the direct-democracy mechanism that created it.
• The federal-heavy and political-science civics standards we checked and rejected. C1.1.1-1.1.4 (political philosophy and systems of government), C2.1.1-2.1.3 (the founding debates and origins as named content), C2.2.1-2.2.3 (the Democratic Values ↔ Constitutional Principles pairing), C3.1.6 (federal revenue and expenditure), C3.3.1-3.3.6 (interest groups, parties, public opinion, campaigns, NGOs, and media types — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis), all of C4 (the Bill of Rights and civil-rights case lists — touched only through Know Your Rights, a thin overlap), all of C5 (U.S. foreign policy and international institutions), C6.3.1 (civic dispositions as a named concept), and C6.4.1/6.4.2 (the pursuit of Democratic Values and a survey of civil disobedience and social movements) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, so we do not claim them.