Full year
In Grade 8 Science, students and teachers engage in learning activities centered around these beliefs. Through the content units of Genetic and Heredity, Evolution of Life, Waves, and Earth and Space Systems, students are expected to:
- Be inquisitive and ask questions
- Develop and use models
- Construct explanations of phenomena
- Plan and carry out investigations
- Analyze and interpret data
- Engage in argument from evidence
- Design, test and modify solutions to problems
- Obtain, evaluate and communicate information
As teachers facilitate learning in a more constructivist environment, we expect students to engage with/in: project-based learning, laboratory practices, discussion, research, writing activities, technology, engineering design, reflection on learning and an analysis of human impact on Earth. In doing so, students find answers and develop new questions while uncovering understanding from essential questions such as:
- How can we model waves to show how waves behave with different materials?
- How can we develop and modify a model to improve a design?
- What is the effect of resource availability and genes on the growth of an organism?
- What effect do animal behaviors and plant structures have on their reproductive success?
- How can organisms today be connected to creatures that lived long ago?
- How did organisms become different from each other?
- What does evidence tell us about how different species are related to a common ancestor?
- How does scientific data reveal patterns that help to describe and predict events in our solar system?
- How can we represent a variety of distances and sizes using scale models?
- How do the forces of gravity and velocity interact to make an orbit possible?