Description

In this module, students experience that organisms exhibit a variety of strategies for life, have a variety of structures and behaviors, have varied but predictable life cycles, and reproduce by passing inherited characteristics to offspring. Students explore how individual organisms have variations in their traits that may provide an advantage in surviving in a particular environment and how our knowledge of animals that survived in past environments is inferred by studying fossil characteristics.

Students engage with the ideas in the Structures of Life Module through five anchor phenomena:

• Anchor phenomenon 1—mystery plants appear
• Anchor phenomenon 2—some bean plants look different
• Anchor phenomenon 3—critters on the loose
• Anchor phenomenon 4—changing population of insects
• Anchor phenomenon 5—uncovering unexpected organisms

Students observe, compare, categorize, and care for organisms. Students engage in science and engineering practices to investigate the structures and behaviors of organisms and learn how the structures function in growth, survival, and reproduction. Students look at the interactions between organisms of the same kind, among organisms of different kinds, and between the environment and populations of organisms over time. Students focus on these crosscutting concepts to develop understandings about organisms and population survival—patterns; cause and effect; scale, proportion, and quantity; systems and system models; and structure and function.