Resources for teachers / grade 7 Life Science
A free Life Science course for Virginia's seventh graders
34 lessons that follow the Virginia Life Science Standards of Learning (2018), LS.1 to LS.11, with the scientific and engineering practices of LS.1 worked into every lesson. It is the middle school companion to our high school Biology course. Free, no account, no ads.
Status: first edition (October 2026). All 8 units are out, covering LS.1 to LS.11. Every lesson is 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, built so a seventh grader can do it alone online:
- Engage. Something students can picture (a scraped knee healing, Bay water losing oxygen at night, a white hare on brown ground), then a quick "What do you think?" check made from the VDOE guide's common student ideas. Students commit to agree or disagree before they read.
- Explore. A simulation with two or three controls and a short "Try this" list: predict, then test.
- Explain. The essential knowledge from the VDOE instructional guide in short sentences, the LS vocabulary in bold, and a narrated film of about two minutes.
- Elaborate. Real data, much of it from Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay. Students read a table, make a claim with evidence and reasoning, then plan an investigation of their own.
- Evaluate. A self-test whose wrong answers are the common student ideas, each with an explanation.
Scope follows the guide's stated limits: no stages of meiosis, single-trait crosses with complete dominance only, no names for the steps of the nitrogen cycle, no types of mutation, and scientists' names as stories rather than test items.
The depth ladder: how it connects to Biology
Every lesson shows a four-step staircase: Life Science (grade 7), Biology, Biology II, College. A Life Science lesson sits on the first step. One step up previews what high school Biology adds and links the matching Biology lesson, so a student who is ready can keep going. The Biology lessons link back down to these lessons in the same way, which makes the pair useful for review in grade 9 and for early finishers in grade 7.
The supports switch: same task, more or less help
A switch at the top of each lesson sets how much help a student gets. It changes the support, never the task.
- 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
LS.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. Lessons not yet released are listed without a link.
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 Life Science, 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.
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.