Anchored Science Unit 8.1: Adaptation and Natural Selection Teacher 3 Year License

Anchored Science by Mi-STAR is a comprehensive middle school science curriculum driven by a bold vision for the future, where science isn’t just a subject but a powerful, integrated body of knowledge that equips students to tackle today’s pressing societal challenges. This curriculum harnesses the full potential of the Next Generation Science Standards, empowering students to actively engage with science and engineering practices. They’ll move beyond the classroom, using their skills to solve real-world problems, making learning both impactful and deeply relevant to their lives and the world around them.

Each unit delivers a NGSS-aligned assessment package that fully integrates tools to measure student progress and deepen their engagement with science. The Professional Learning program provides a dynamic range of flexible, ongoing opportunities, enabling teachers to not only master the unit content but also continually enhance their skills, while motivating and challenging their students.

Unit 8.1: Adaptation and Natural Selection, Bugs in the Bed!?
Unit Challenge Question: How can a species survive a change in the environment?

In this unit, students discover how a species can survive a change in the environment through the processes of natural selection and adaptation. Students use models and mathematical representations to support their explanation for how the traits of a population of organisms can change over time in order to adapt to a change in their environment. The Unit Challenge uses bed bug resistance to insecticide as the context to explore these processes in action in a real-life scenario.

Students first learn that traits in a population can have different effects on organisms depending on the environmental conditions present, and those traits can affect some individuals’ probability of surviving and reproducing. Then students examine how different traits can occur in a population, first building on prior knowledge from Unit 7.6 about sexual reproduction and then examining another cause - genetic mutations - and their effect on the structure and function of an organism’s proteins. Students apply these concepts over large timescales to explain how natural selection can affect the distribution of traits in a population over time, causing the population or species to adapt to the change in the environment.

Included with this purchase is a 3 year license to access the Teacher Edition eBook and digital resources through our online platform, Flourish.