All courses · middle school course
Life Science
A complete grade 7 Life Science course built on the Virginia Life Science Standards of Learning (LS.1 to LS.11). Every lesson opens with something you can see, 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 up to the matching high school Biology lesson.
6 units · 22 lessons
Unit 1 · Cells
- Unit 1: Cells Cells Are Everywhere How can a drop of pond water look empty to your eyes and still be full of living things?
- Unit 1: Cells Inside a Cell Why is a heart muscle cell crowded with mitochondria, while a fat cell is mostly one big drop of fat?
- Unit 1: Cells Plant Cells and Animal Cells Why does a limp stalk of celery get crisp again in water, when drinking water does not make you any stiffer?
- Unit 1: Cells How Cells Divide When you scrape your knee, where does the new skin come from?
- Unit 1: Cells Diffusion and Osmosis Why does salted cucumber get wet, while limp lettuce in plain cold water turns crisp?
Unit 2 · Organizing and classifying life
- Unit 2: Organizing and classifying life From Cells to Organisms How can a single Paramecium swim, eat, pump out water and divide, when your body shares those jobs among trillions of cells?
- Unit 2: Organizing and classifying life Sorting Living Things In Virginia some people call a vulture a buzzard, and in Britain the buzzard is a hawk, so how can a scientist say which bird they mean?
- Unit 2: Organizing and classifying life Domains, Kingdoms and DNA A mushroom stays in one place like a plant, so why do scientists say fungi are closer relatives of animals?
Unit 3 · Energy for life
- Unit 3: Energy for life Photosynthesis Feeds the World How can a seed that weighs, on average, less than a tenth of a gram grow into a tree with thousands of kilograms of wood, while the ground under it does not seem to shrink?
- Unit 3: Energy for life Releasing Energy from Food Why do sprouting peas in a thermos get warmer than the room, and why does yeast in warm sugar water blow up a balloon?
- Unit 3: Energy for life Partners in Energy Why does the oxygen in a quiet Virginia creek go up and down over a single summer day?
Unit 4 · Matter and energy in ecosystems
- Unit 4: Matter and energy in ecosystems Food Webs and Energy If ospreys eat menhaden and menhaden eat plankton, how much of the sun’s energy ever reaches an osprey?
- Unit 4: Matter and energy in ecosystems Producers, Consumers and Decomposers Leaves fall in the forest every autumn, so why don’t the old ones just keep piling up?
- Unit 4: Matter and energy in ecosystems The Carbon and Water Cycles Why does the carbon dioxide in the air over a Hawaiian volcano rise and fall every year?
- Unit 4: Matter and energy in ecosystems Nitrogen for Life If the air is mostly nitrogen, why does a cornfield need nitrogen added while the soybeans next door often do not?
Unit 5 · Heredity
- Unit 7: Heredity DNA: The Code of Life If strawberries, mushrooms, bacteria and people all have DNA, why are they so different?
- Unit 7: Heredity Reproduction and Meiosis Why does a strawberry runner grow into a copy of its parent, but brothers and sisters do not come out as copies of each other?
- Unit 7: Heredity Predicting Traits with Punnett Squares How can two purple-flowered pea plants have offspring with white flowers, and can we predict how many?
- Unit 7: Heredity Inherited or Acquired? How can two cuttings from the same hydrangea bloom blue in one garden and pink in another, and how can a dominant trait be rare?
Unit 6 · Change over time
- Unit 8: Change over time Mutations and Variation Why are no two leaves on one white oak, or two students in one class, exactly the same, and is a mutation always bad news?
- Unit 8: Change over time Natural Selection in Action Why did nearly black peppered moths become common in smoky industrial areas, and then become rare again once the air got cleaner?
- Unit 8: Change over time Evidence for Evolution How can a scallop shell millions of years old, a bat wing and a protein in your cells all tell the same story?