However, many administrators and teachers stop at the language arts textbook and don’t bring any other subject areas or teach the unit in any more depth than the few stories in the text.

Also, sometimes we assume that because it’s in the mandated text that it’s a standard. Fossils and camouflage are in the second grade reader but the standards are broader and richer like animal adaptation and how life has changed from long ago to now, I believe.

If you teach to the standards, then you relate the language arts text to those standards rather than the other way around. The standards in this case give you license to include additional material and investigation in your units that isn’t there if you stop where the basal ends.