Life Science · U1-L1
What Makes Something Alive
The characteristics every living thing shares, and what that complexity might point to.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Five vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- Day 1: four questions with the answer findable in the text
- Day 2: a vocabulary check and a printable answer sheet
Life Science · U1-L2
Life Only Comes From Life
Two experiments across two hundred years, and the question neither of them could reach.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Four vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- Day 1: four questions with the answer findable in the text
- Day 2: a vocabulary check and a printable answer sheet
Life Science · U1-L3
How We Know What We Know
Science is a method, not a pile of facts. What the method can settle, and what it cannot.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Five vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- Day 1: four questions with the answer findable in the text
- Day 2: a vocabulary check and a printable answer sheet
Life Science · U1-L4
Science You Use Every Day
What the method has already done to your ordinary morning, and the choices it hands you.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Four vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- Day 1: four questions with the answer findable in the text
- Day 2: a vocabulary check and a printable answer sheet
Life Science · U1-L5
Unit 1 Review: Life, Science, and How We Know
Four lessons back in one place, built around one question: how do you know that is why it happened?
- Two plants, one taller, and the difference between seeing it and explaining it
- The scientific method walked end to end on a single question about sunlight
- Redi, Pasteur, and an idea that sounded reasonable and was wrong
- Hypothesis, theory and law, and why a theory never becomes a law
Life Science · U2-L1
Cells: The Building Blocks of Life
Cells were inside every living thing long before anyone knew. This is the story of the tool that let us look.
- A brick wall that turns into bricks as you walk toward it
- Hooke's cork, and why he called them cells when nothing in them was alive
- Leeuwenhoek finding things swimming in water that looked perfectly clear
- Why an electron microscope is not simply the better microscope
Life Science · U2-L2
Inside a Cell, Part by Part
Walk into a warehouse and you can read everyone's job in thirty seconds. A cell is the same building, shrunk to the size of a pin head.
- A warehouse floor, and why nobody ever had to explain one to you
- The three things every cell that has ever been found has
- One question that splits every cell on earth into two kinds
- Proverbs 24, on a house whose chambers are filled
Life Science · U2-L3
From Cells to Tissues to Organs
Cells are not all alike, and the shape of one usually tells you what it is for. Then how they stack up into a whole body.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Four vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- The four rungs from a single cell up to a whole organism
- A vocabulary check and a printable answer sheet
Life Science · U2-L4
Organ Transplants, and the Questions They Raise
A kidney from one person can save the life of another, and sometimes the body refuses it. Why that happens, and what to do about how few organs there are.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Four words, each one defined inside the reading
- Four questions with the answer findable in the text
- A written argument to do in your notebook, with no right answer
Life Science · U2-L5
Unit 2 Review: Inside the Cell
The whole unit in one pass: the cell theory, the parts inside a cell, how cells team up into a body, and what happens when an organ moves from one person to another.
- The cell theory and the three things it says
- The parts of a cell, and which job belongs to which part
- Cells, tissues, organs and organ systems in order
- Two questions to answer in writing, with no answer key
Life Science · U3-L1
What Living Things Are Made Of
Everything you're made of is built from a small handful of pieces. Start with the atom and climb to the four kinds of molecules that make up every living thing.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Nine words, each one defined inside the reading
- Six questions with the answer findable in the text
- Five vocabulary questions on the word cards
Life Science · U3-L2
How Things Get In and Out of a Cell
A cell has to let food in and push waste out without letting in everything else. How it chooses, and what it costs.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Eight vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- Four questions with the answer findable in the text
- A vocabulary check and a printable answer sheet
Life Science · U3-L3
Where a Cell Gets Its Energy
Every bit of energy in your body was sunlight first. The steps in between, and what each one is called.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Six vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- Four questions with the answer findable in the text
- A vocabulary check and a printable answer sheet
Life Science · U3-L4
What We Throw Away, and Where It Goes
Some things rot away and some things do not. Which is which, why it matters, and what you think should be done about it.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Four vocabulary words, each one defined inside the reading
- Four questions with the answer findable in the text
- A written argument to do in your notebook, with no right answer
Life Science · U3-L5
Unit 3 Review: How Cells Work
The whole unit in one pass: what a living thing is built from, how things get into a cell, where its energy comes from, and what happens to what we throw away.
- Atoms, compounds and the four organic groups
- Diffusion, osmosis, and which crossings cost energy
- Photosynthesis and cellular respiration as one loop
- Two questions to answer in writing, with no answer key
Life Science · U4-L1
How a Cell Grows and Divides
Right now, while you read this, parts of you are splitting in two. How one cell becomes two, and why both get exactly the same instructions.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- The five stages of mitosis in order, with a way to remember them
- How plant and animal cells split differently
- Fission, budding and regeneration as mitosis doing a bigger job
Life Science · U4-L2
Two Parents, and How Traits Combine
Every cell in you has 46 chromosomes, and you started from two cells. So why don't you have 92? Meiosis, and the halving that makes a new life possible.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Why sex cells carry half the chromosomes
- Meiosis: two divisions, four cells
- Fertilization and the zygote
Life Science · U4-L3
DNA: The Instructions Inside
A photograph nobody asked permission to show, a spiral staircase, and the four-letter code that tells every cell in you what to build.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- Rosalind Franklin, and the photograph that cracked DNA
- The four bases, and the partner each one always takes
- How DNA copies itself, and how a gene becomes a protein
Life Science · U4-L4
Engineering Living Things, and Where the Line Is
Scientists can move a gene from one living thing into another, and in 1988 someone patented the result. What that means, and a question you'll have to answer yourself.
- A story-form reading, read aloud with the words highlighted
- What a transgenic organism is, with the book's real examples
- The benefits and the worries, side by side
- A You Decide question to answer in writing, with no answer key