All courses · high school course
Biology
A complete high school Biology course for grades 9 and 10, built on the Virginia Biology Standards of Learning (BIO.1 to BIO.8). Every lesson opens with a phenomenon, runs a simulation, works with real data (much of it from Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay), and ends in claim, evidence and reasoning. A supports switch adds word banks, sentence frames and labelled diagrams without changing the task, and a depth ladder links each idea one step down to grade 7 Life Science and one step up to Biology II and college.
7 units · 33 lessons
Unit 1 · The chemistry of life
- Unit 1: The chemistry of life Water and Life On a hot July day in the Chesapeake Bay, why did the air change by about 8 degrees Celsius while the water changed by less than 1.5?
- Unit 1: The chemistry of life What Am I Made Of? How can a turkey sandwich on whole-wheat bread end up as part of your own body?
- Unit 1: The chemistry of life Enzymes at Work Why does fresh pineapple keep gelatin from setting, while canned pineapple lets it set?
- Unit 1: The chemistry of life Capturing Sunlight How can a willow gain more than 160 pounds in five years while the soil in its pot loses only about 2 ounces?
- Unit 1: The chemistry of life Respiration and ATP Why do your legs burn after a sprint, why does bread dough puff up, and why does the deep Chesapeake Bay lose its oxygen in summer?
Unit 2 · Cells
- Unit 2: Cells The Cell Theory and Its Evidence Robert Hooke saw tiny boxes in a slice of cork in 1665, so why did it take about 175 more years to claim that plants and animals alike are made of cells?
- Unit 2: Cells Organelles as a System How does a beta cell in your pancreas turn instructions stored in its nucleus into insulin released at its outer edge?
- Unit 2: Cells Crossing the Membrane Why does a slice of cucumber left in salty water get lighter and go limp, while a slice in plain water gets heavier?
- Unit 2: Cells Homeostasis in Action Why does your heart speed up when you run up the stairs, and then slow down again over the next few minutes?
- Unit 2: Cells The Cell Cycle and Mitosis How does a cut on your finger fill back in, and how does an onion root push deeper into the soil?
- Unit 2: Cells One Cell or Many How can a Paramecium feed, swim, pump out water and divide with only one cell, when your body shares those jobs among many kinds of cells?
Unit 3 · Bacteria and viruses
- Unit 3: Bacteria and viruses Living or Not? Viruses and Bacteria A cold virus on a light switch does nothing on its own for hours, yet inside your nose it gets cells to build new copies of it. Is it alive?
- Unit 3: Bacteria and viruses How Microbes Multiply How can one bacterium become millions of cells in an afternoon, and how can a cold sore heal and then come back in about the same spot?
- Unit 3: Bacteria and viruses Microbes in Bodies and Ecosystems Why do the roots of a healthy soybean plant carry small bumps full of bacteria, and what would the plant lose without them?
- Unit 3: Bacteria and viruses Germs, Vaccines and Antibiotics Why did mothers in one maternity clinic of a Vienna hospital die far more often than mothers in the other, and why did the gap shrink once doctors washed their hands in chlorine?
Unit 4 · DNA and inheritance
- Unit 4: DNA and inheritance DNA: Structure and Copying How does a cell copy nearly two metres of DNA, folded inside a nucleus far too small to see without a microscope, and get almost every letter right?
- Unit 4: DNA and inheritance How the DNA Model Was Built Reading the first human genome took a project of about 13 years, and by 2022 the estimated cost to sequence a human-sized genome was about $525. What changed?
- Unit 4: DNA and inheritance From DNA to Protein How can changing one letter out of hundreds in a gene make red blood cells bend into stiff sickle shapes?
- Unit 4: DNA and inheritance Meiosis and Variation If two parents give every child half of their chromosomes, why do their children come out different from each other?
- Unit 4: DNA and inheritance Mendel and Punnett Squares Crossing purple-flowered and white-flowered pea plants gave only purple offspring, yet white flowers came back in the next generation. Where had the white been hiding?
- Unit 4: DNA and inheritance Beyond Dominant and Recessive Why does a red snapdragon crossed with a white one give pink flowers, while a red Shorthorn bred with a white one gives a calf with red and white hairs side by side?
- Unit 4: DNA and inheritance Engineering Genes For about sixty years, insulin for people with diabetes came mostly from the pancreases of cattle and pigs. How did bacteria and yeast end up making human insulin instead?
Unit 5 · Classifying life
- Unit 5: Classifying life Building a Tree of Life A whale lives in the sea and has a body shaped like a fish, so why do biologists say its closest living relatives are hippos?
- Unit 5: Classifying life Domains and Kingdoms One drop of pond water can hold organisms from all three domains of life. Which questions would you ask to tell them apart?
- Unit 5: Classifying life Classification Changes If some microbes look just like bacteria under a microscope, how could a molecule inside them show they belong to a different domain of life?
Unit 6 · Evolution
- Unit 6: Evolution Evidence for Evolution If whales live their whole lives in water, why do some fossil whales have legs, and why do living whales still carry small hip bones?
- Unit 6: Evolution Variation and Survival After years of ivory poaching in Mozambique, about half of the female elephants that survived had no tusks. How could a whole population change like that?
- Unit 6: Evolution Natural Selection and New Species After a drought killed most of the medium ground finches on one small island, why did the birds that were left have deeper beaks?
Unit 7 · Ecosystems
- Unit 7: Ecosystems Populations and Carrying Capacity Why can the number of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay change by more than 100 million from one winter to the next?
- Unit 7: Ecosystems Energy in Ecosystems An osprey on the Chesapeake Bay eats fish, and the fish eat plankton, so how much of the sunlight the plankton caught ever reaches the osprey?
- Unit 7: Ecosystems Matter Cycles Where were the atoms in a Chesapeake blue crab before they became part of the crab?
- Unit 7: Ecosystems Succession in Virginia If you stopped mowing a field in the Virginia Piedmont and walked away for a hundred years, what would be standing there when you came back?
- Unit 7: Ecosystems The Chesapeake Under Pressure How can fertilizer spread on a field far upstream leave crabs and fish short of oxygen at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay?