Resources for teachers / high school Biology
A free Biology course for Virginia classrooms
Thirty-three lessons that follow the Virginia Biology Standards of Learning, BIO.1 to BIO.8, with the science and engineering practices of BIO.1 worked into every lesson. Free, no account, no ads.
Status: first edition (October 2026). Complete coverage of BIO.1 to BIO.8, checked against published sources by AI models from two companies, with classroom testing just beginning. Updated continuously; teacher feedback is welcome on every page.
What every lesson has
Each lesson follows the 5E arc you already plan with, built so a student can do it alone online:
- Engage. A phenomenon and an essential question, then a quick "What do you think?" check made from the guide's common student ideas. Students commit to agree or disagree before they read.
- Explore. A simulation with a few controls and a short "Try this" list: predict, then test.
- Explain. The essential knowledge from the VDOE instructional guide, in plain sentences, with the SOL vocabulary in bold and a short narrated film.
- Elaborate. Real data, much of it from Virginia: Chesapeake Bay buoys, seagrass surveys, the blue crab winter dredge survey, Piedmont forests. Students make a claim and support it with evidence and reasoning, then plan an investigation.
- Evaluate. A self-test whose wrong answers are the common student ideas, each with an explanation.
Scope follows the guide's stated limits. Meiosis is taught as two divisions, with crossing over and independent assortment placed in the first; the named sub-stages appear only as a preview. Crosses stop at dihybrid, with incomplete dominance and codominance; there are no sex-linked or polygenic crosses. Photosynthesis and respiration stop at inputs, outputs, organelles and ATP.
The depth ladder: where an idea sits
Every lesson shows a four-step staircase: Life Science (grade 7), Biology, Biology II, College. One step down opens a grade 7 review of the same idea, for a student who missed it, and links the matching lesson in our grade 7 Life Science course as those lessons are released. One step up previews where Virginia's Biology II courses take it, and links the matching college lesson on this site, so a student who is ready can keep going. The college lessons link back down the same way.
The supports switch: same task, more or less help
A switch at the top of each lesson sets how much support a student gets. It changes the support, never the content or the task, the way the VDOE differentiated lesson plans do.
- Just the task. Unlabelled diagrams to label; no word bank.
- Some help (the default). Word banks and partly labelled diagrams.
- Most help. Adds sentence starters for claim, evidence and reasoning, fully labelled diagrams, and a one-line key idea after each section.
It works with JavaScript turned off. With JavaScript, the page remembers a student's choice, and you can
link a whole class to one setting by adding ?supports=0, ?supports=1 or
?supports=2 to a lesson's address.
Standards map
BIO.1, the scientific and engineering practices, runs through every lesson: each one asks for a prediction, an investigation plan, and a claim backed by evidence and reasoning from real data.
How it was made, and how you can help
The lessons, films, simulations and figures were drafted with AI from the VDOE instructional guide and checked by other AI models against published sources, before any person read them. Every lesson lists its sources. That is why we are asking teachers to audit them.
If you teach Biology, pick a lesson you know well and read it as you would a student's textbook. Is anything wrong, unclear, too hard, too easy, or missing from the SOL? Every lesson page has a "Report an error" link; it takes two minutes and goes straight to Chris. You can also send a general note.
All 33 lessons are out, and they are free to use with your classes. This is an early edition, built quickly so teachers could use it this year. Corrections go in within days, not at the next printing, so it will keep getting better, and the more teachers tell us, the faster that happens.