Natural Selection and Common Ancestry introduces Grade 8 students to the processes that have led all living things to have a connection to the past, and the processes by which populations change over time. The subtitle of the unit is: could living things today be connected to things that lived long ago? The Student Reader is the integrated science literacy component of the unit. In the Student Reader students picture the fossil record to see how organisms in the past both resemble and differ from extant living things, explore the role of carbon-14 in dating fossils, explore phylogenetic trees, examine convergence and embryology, and more. Student Readers focus on aspects of science literacy, including factual articles, history of the sciences, art and literature, spotting bad science in the media and advertisements, graphics comprehension, research-type articles, reliability of sources, and other areas of science literacy.

CKSci Middle School is an enhanced republication of the OpenSciEd Middle School project–with a unique, integrated Core Knowledge science literacy component.

Learn more about the CKSci Middle School Program