BENCHMARKS - The Standards are embedded within the benchmarks. Please access the link below for more information.

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The BENCHMARKS addressed by this activity include:

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that:

• Some animals and plants are alike in the way they look and in the things they do, and others are very different from one another.
• Plants and animals have features that help them live in different environments.
• Stories sometimes give plants and animals attributes they really do not have.

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

• Individuals of the same kind differ in their characteristics, and sometimes the differences give individuals an advantage in surviving and reproducing.
• Fossils can be compared to one another and to living organisms according to their similarities and differences. Some organisms that lived long ago are similar to existing organisms, but some are quite different.

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

• Small differences between parents and offspring can accumulate (through selective breeding) in successive generations so that descendants are very different from their ancestors.
• Individual organisms with certain traits are more likely than others to survive and have offspring. Changes in environmental conditions can affect the survival of individual organisms and entire species.
• Many thousands of layers of sedimentary rock provide evidence for the long history of the earth and for the long history of changing life forms whose remains are found in the rocks. More recently deposited rock layers are more likely to contain fossils resembling existing species.

• A great diversity of species increases the chance that at least some living things will survive in the face of large changes in the environment.

• The degree of kinship between organisms or species can be estimated from the similarity of their DNA sequences, which often closely matches their classification based on anatomical similarities

• The basic idea of biological evolution is that the earth's present-day species developed from earlier, distinctly different species.
• Molecular evidence substantiates the anatomical evidence for evolution and provides additional detail about the sequence in which various lines of descent branched off from one another.
• Evolution builds on what already exists, so the more variety there is, the more there can be in the future.  But evolution does not necessitate long-term progress in some set direction.  Evolutionary changes appear to be like the growth of a bush:  Some branches survive from the beginning with little or no change, many die out altogether, and others branch repeatedly, sometimes giving rise to more complex organisms.

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