Heredity: Inheritance and Variation of Traits 7

In the last unit, students analyzed how engineers can mimic plant and animal structures to solve problems facing people. In this unit, students begin by exploring animal behaviors of parents and offspring that help the offspring survive.

Once students have modeled the science phenomena of insects’ body parts, they then focus on one kind of insect: the ant. They conduct an experiment to test the taste preference of harvester ants, and observe how ants use their different body parts to get food, communicate with one another, and carry out other life functions.

In the last unit, students explored how animals have body parts that help them survive and grow. In this unit, students apply what they have learned about the structures of plants and animals to mimic those structures to solve problems facing people. 

In this unit, students begin an exploration of  life sciences. Once students have described the differences between living and nonliving things and analyzed what all living things need to survive, they focus on the parts of plants that help them get what they need to survive.

In this unit, students evaluate the science phenomena of how a change to an ecosystem can impact the living things that make it up. In this lesson, students explore how a change to the kind of plants in an environment results in a ripple effect phenomena on predation in the area. This page is a high-level extract of this lesson.