Resource Detail: SciPack

This resource has 35 correlations with the National Standards.  
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• Life Science
  • Life cycles of organisms
    • Plants and animals closely resemble their parents. (K-4)
    • Many characteristics of an organism are inherited from the parents of the organism, but other characteristics result from an individual's interactions with the environment. Inherited characteristics include the color of flowers and the number of limbs of an animal. (K-4)
    • Other features, such as the ability to ride a bicycle, are learned through interactions with the environment and cannot be passed on to the next generation. (K-4)
  • Structure and function in living systems
    • Cells carry on the many functions needed to sustain life. They grow and divide, thereby producing more cells. (5-8)
  • Reproduction and heredity
    • Reproduction is a characteristic of all living systems; because no individual organism lives forever, reproduction is essential to the continuation of every species. (5-8)
    • Some organisms reproduce asexually (5-8)
    • Some organisms reproduce sexually. (5-8)
    • In many species, including humans, females produce eggs and males produce sperm. (5-8)
    • Plants also reproduce sexually--the egg and sperm are produced in the flowers of flowering plants. (5-8)
    • An egg and sperm unite to begin development of a new individual. That new individual receives genetic information from its mother (via the egg) and its father (via the sperm). (5-8)
    • Sexually produced offspring never are identical to either of their parents. (5-8)
    • Every organism requires a set of instructions for specifying its traits (5-8)
    • Heredity is the passage of these instructions from one generation to another. (5-8)
    • A human cell contains many thousands of different genes. (5-8)
    • Each gene carries a single unit of information. (5-8)
    • An inherited trait of an individual can be determined by one or by many genes, and a single gene can influence more than one trait. (5-8)
    • Hereditary information is contained in genes, located in the chromosomes of each cell. (5-8)
    • The characteristics of an organism can be described in terms of a combination of traits. (5-8)
    • Some traits are inherited and others result from interactions with the environment. (5-8)
  • The cell
    • Cells store and use information to guide their functions. (9-12)
    • The genetic information stored in DNA is used to direct the synthesis of the thousands of proteins that each cell requires. (9-12)
  • Molecular basis of heredity
    • In all organisms, the instructions for specifying the characteristics of the organism are carried in DNA, a large polymer formed from subunits of four kinds (A, G, C, and T). (9-12)
    • The chemical and structural properties of DNA explain how the genetic information that underlies heredity is both encoded in genes (as a string of molecular "letters") and replicated (by a templating mechanism). (9-12)
    • Each DNA molecule in a cell forms a single chromosome. (9-12)
    • Most of the cells in a human contain two copies of each of 22 different chromosomes. (9-12)
    • In human cells, there is a pair of chromosomes that determines sex: a female contains two X chromosomes and a male contains one X and one Y chromosome. (9-12)
    • Transmission of genetic information to offspring occurs through egg and sperm cells that contain only one representative from each chromosome pair. An egg and a sperm unite to form a new individual. (9-12)
    • The fact that the human body is formed from cells that contain two copies of each chromosome--and therefore two copies of each gene--explains many features of human heredity, such as how variations that are hidden in one generation can be expressed in the next. (9-12)
    • Changes in DNA (mutations) occur spontaneously at low rates. (9-12)
    • Some of the changes in DNA make no difference to the organism, whereas others can change cells and organisms. (9-12)
    • Only mutations in germ cells can create the variation that changes an organism's offspring. (9-12)

• History and Nature of Science
  • Science as a human endeavor
    • Science and technology have been practiced by people for a long time.
    • Men and women have made a variety of contributions throughout the history of science and technology.
    • Doing science or engineering can be as simple as an individual conducting field studies or as complex as hundreds of people working on a major scientific question or technological problem. (9-12)
  • Nature of science
    • Scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation, experiments, and theoretical and mathematical models. Those ideas are not likely to change greatly in the future. (5-8)