SC.7.L.15.2

Complete a brochure for the Galapagos Islands. The purpose of your brochure is to attract tourists to the island in order to support research and preservation of the island and its many natural resources.

Type: Assessment

In this Model Eliciting Activity (MEA), students will attempt to identify, draw, and describe evolutionary relationships between a collection of reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era and that shared a common reptilian ancestor that lived earlier - in the Paleozoic Era.  The students will receive images of and facts about each of the reptiles, and will use those images and facts to prepare a cladogram – a tree-shaped diagram illustrating their hypotheses about those evolutionary relationships based on shared derived traits – and describe each of the branch points on the tree they construct.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will analyze an informational text intended to support reading in the content area. This article describes new research suggesting urban life creates evolutionary changes in plants and animals. Examples of changes to an urban growing plant (the white clover) and a Leapin' Lizard are described as they evolve to suit their new environment. This lesson includes a note-taking guide, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, answer keys, and a writing rubric.

Type: Lesson Plan

Dr. Alex Wilson of the University of Miami is an evolutionary biologist whose research centers on symbiotic relationships. In this short animated film, she explains exactly how the bacteria aids the aphid. The film explores how scientists use what they learn to seek evolutionary patterns in nature. "" from Day's Edge Productions on Vimeo is the third of four films created with funding from the National Science Foundation. This lesson, which includes a pre-test, slide presentation, activity, and formative assessment was developed to support the learning concepts provided by Dr. Wilson's films.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students read an interesting article about a fish with a see-through head to help them think about traits that are beneficial in a certain environment (adaptation). They also consider how improved observations lead to more sophisticated science ideas.

Type: Lesson Plan

This role-playing activity will visually show students how genetic variation and environmental factors contribute to evolution by natural selection and diversity of organisms. During this activity, students will represent the alleles themselves! Students will "mate" to create various genotypes and phenotypes through an engaging, fun, and content-enriched activity. Students will use scientific and mathematical skills to complete and draw conclusions.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students simulate the process of natural selection and its effects on prey phenotype frequencies over multiple generations. Students are provided with four background patterns and many prey pieces in four corresponding patterns. In this way, each prey type is well-camouflaged for one corresponding background, but is less suited to the others in varying degrees. Following several rounds of natural selection simulation, students compare prey phenotype frequencies to those frequencies found using random selection.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is designed to help students to explore Natural Selection by the adaptation of bird feet to their habitat and food choices.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is an introductory lesson that enables students to explore camouflage as an adaptation that enables organisms to escape predation. Students decorate moths and place them around the classroom to hide them from the moth eater birds. Students then get the opportunity to be the birds and search for moths hidden by their classmates. This lesson lets students explore adaptations that help the moths survive in their environment.

Type: Lesson Plan

This resource uses a variety of techniques to address the factors that contribute to natural selection. Included in the lesson is a hook to engage students, a weblab exercise, a poster activity for expression and a hands-on simulation.

Type: Lesson Plan

The 5E lesson addresses the theory of evolution beginning with Darwin's travels and observations. The lesson builds on the evidence and observations of Darwin by teaching how genetic variation and environmental factors affect evolution. This is then related to the ability or inability of a species to adapt with in a changing environment.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will recognize and explain ways an organism can be affected by genetics, environmental factors and relate how an organism can be in danger of extinction if it cannot adapt to its environment.

The teacher implements a variety of instructional components:

• Students read two e! Science News articles (can read online if internet accessible or the teacher can make copies for class ahead of time) on bird adaptations.
• Students then research a Florida coastal bird from a list provided in the lesson to create a "Vote for Me" poster. With this, students summarize their research and information gathered on a Florida coastal bird and try to convince their classmates that their bird's beak is the "best."
• Students will engage in the Battle of the Beaks hands-on activity using everyday items to simulate different bird beaks.
• Finally, students will write a response to "Who has the best beak?" using references from the science news articles, the poster presentations, and their research (website links in lesson)

Type: Lesson Plan

Students learn that an animal's physical attributes, such as a bird's beak, may provide an advantage for survival in one environment but not in another. Students will participate in modeling and investigating structure and function relationships.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will see how evolution works with a simulated breeding bunnies lab using red and white beans, one representing dominant alleles and the other recessive alleles. This lesson can be used in sixth grade with some minor modifications of the directions and the data being recorded.

Type: Lesson Plan

This toolkit is designed to assist lesson study teams as they work to develop a unit on natural selection that conforms to the state academic standards for science mathematics and English language arts.

Type: Lesson Study Resource Kit

Learn how evolution is influenced by genetic variation, natural selection, and allele frequency in this interactive tutorial.

This is part 1 in a two-part series. After you finish this tutorial, check out .

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Examine how evolution is influenced by genetic variation, natural selection, and allele frequency through the lens of organism genotype. 

Click below to open part 1.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Nick Moore discusses his research behind optimizing wing design using inspiration from animals and how they swim and fly.

Download the CPALMS Perspectives video student note taking guide.

Type: Perspectives Video: Expert

Students collect fish using seine nets and observe/explain how the physical traits of fish are related to long term environmental factors and genetic variation and adaptation.

Type: Problem-Solving Task

This activity explores concepts studied by genetic scientists as well as biomedical and environmental engineers.

Type: Teaching Idea

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. It describes new research suggesting urban life creates evolutionary changes in plants and animals. Examples of changes to an urban growing plant (the white clover) and a Leapin' Lizard are presented as they evolve to suit their new environment.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. 

This article describes several fascinating examples of rapid evolution by natural selection. It explains research on three organisms, cichlids, crickets and sea urchins, that demonstrates how these creatures have quickly adapted to their changing environments. This is a very useful article for students beginning to explore the concepts of natural selection, evolution, and extinction.  

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article is mostly a biography of Charles Darwin, including his studies and what drove him to be a biologist. The second half of the article discusses his theory of evolution by natural selection and his influences on the development of the theory. It gives a synopsis of how natural selection operates.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The appendix has long been thought to be useless. However, new research suggests that the appendix actually can have a healthy function—to harbor bacteria beneficial to the immune system. This would have been vital early in humans' evolutionary history, when the chance of infection was much higher and medicine was lacking, and may still play that role for people in less developed parts of the world.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article discusses how crickets on two Hawaiian islands have evolved wings that make them silent in response to parasitoid flies that locate male crickets via sound (and eat them from the inside out!). The crickets on Kauai and Oahu evolved completely different silent wing types, which is evidence that these two cricket populations evolved their silent wings independently.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The human evolution of bipedalism (walking upright) has resulted in a change in the morphology of the spine, feet, and other features of modern humans that are also present in fossils of our hominid ancestors. These changes have resulted in unintended consequences - body pains and injuries that our non-bipedal primate relatives do not experience.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article discusses current thinking and popular hypotheses for the function of zebra stripes. A recent study indicates that zebra stripes may protect the animals from fly bites, which are both a nuisance to the animals and a means of spreading infectious fatal diseases.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article explains how natural selection can lead to changes in populations. Variations in body types were observed in a species of climbing goby (a fish) in Hawaii. These variations allow differential success in avoiding predators and climbing waterfalls. Depending on conditions on different islands, individuals with certain body types are more likely to thrive because their body type makes it easier for them to survive and reproduce.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. This article discusses how the early tyrannosaur's rise to dominance was likely delayed by the existence of a newly discovered, fiercer predator with which it competed. The new dino, Siats meekerorum, likely postponed tyrannosaur's emergence as the top predator in its ecosystem.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The text compares the bone and muscle structure of early Homo sapiens and Neandertals. It describes the ability to run long distances in one and not the other and explains how this difference may have evolved.

Type: Text Resource

Students will explore natural selection by controlling the environment and causing mutations in bunnies. This will demonstrate how natural selection works in nature. They will have the opportunity to throw in different variables to see what will make their species of rabbit survive.

Type: Virtual Manipulative

PBS has developed an EXCELLENT unit on Evolution It has great activities, video clips, and games that lead a student through the mechanisms that lead to evolution, evidence that supports evolution, and the evolution ideas/scientific discoveries.

Type: WebQuest