Good question, nothing like what your book is about! That
sounds very boring and confusing.

The first half of fifth grade spends a lot of time on animal and
plant adaptations, what kinds, how they are adapted to their
environment, etc., and then we go to cells and then space, which
create a whole lot of "big picture" questions about how we all
got here. I usually give a very abridged
discussion/lecture-type explanation... well, it's two days long,
but it's billions of years in two days. I do the toilet paper
thing, to see that if the roll is the entire history of the
earth, humans have only been around for a half inch of the last
square, diagrams of human evolution... I minored in
anthropology, so I like all that stuff, and my previous goal was
just to answer their questions. When I put that two hour
lecture together, it took me forever because nothing is at the
fifth grade level.

The junior high teacher asked that I add evolution and Darwin
into my curriculum so that the kids have heard of it before and
to make it easier for her to teach it, which I was happy to do,
like I said, it's my minor, previously only ever applied for two
classes a year.

So, to actually get around to answering the question... the
state standards that I'd like to cover are Understand natural
selection or survival of the fittest, and understand that this
is thought to be one of the explanations for how animals and
plants change over time and that it was the explanation given by
Charles Darwin. Understand how fossils provide evidence that
animals and plants have changed over time and that new species
of organisms changed over time out of older ones.

Knowing my curriculum and students, the two main questions they
have are why the adaptations happen (they have to learn the
adaptations plants and animals have in each biome, but they
aren't quite clear on how they developed) and if people came
from monkeys. I've also never really done a great job of
teaching how mutations happen or making it understandable to
them without disregarding the extremely long time periods we are
working with. Definitely not chromosomes! They are about to
learn the definition of chromosome on Wednesday, and that will
be about as far as they get with that!

I like the evolution game analogy.

For all the millions of articles in the scientific world about
that I shouldn't be afraid to teach evolution, it would be nice
if half of those people wrote some teaching materials instead!
Even middle school material would be perfectly fine, I can't
find anything that's not high school.

On 1/04/09, Zhel wrote:
> On 1/04/09, Cullen wrote:
>> I'm looking to spend 1-2 weeks introducing Darwin and
>> evolution to my fifth graders. I'm looking for something
>> that has lots of things I can print out... the science book
>> doesn't have anything on it (go figure) and it's difficult
>> to find reading material about this at the fifth grade
>> level.
>>
>> Any suggestions? Ideally I'd love to just buy one of those
>> $13 reproducible books with the homework and passages ready
>> to copy. I can find them on any other science topic in the
>> world for any grade level but this.
>
> 5th grade is very young; we do this unit at the end of 7th
> grade. What are your exact objectives for this unit on this
> level? I am afraid most would be over their heads
> (chromosomes? genes?)
>
> (Our own textbook chapter is very boring and confusing. It
> seems to concentrate on the fact that there is significant
> diversity in each population, and from there it goes to the
> blah-blah-blah-land without any conclusion.)
>
> I think that the most important conclusion that students
> should reach from this unit is that chance is most
> important in evolution and that it happens randomly. It
> works like a criterion-referenced test, letting into the
> next generation only those who passed the evolution game,
> and the rules for playing the game change randomly in each
> generation ("in this round we will pass only the individual
> antelopes with tails 3 inches or shorter").
>
> One anecdote I found about Darwin is that he did not label
> his finch specimens with the name of the island where he
> collected them, so people had to go to Galapagos again to
> check each species. (I use that as a reminder for them to
> take complete notes).

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