Life Science

Sixth-grade life science is where biology stops being a vocabulary list and starts being a real way of thinking. This nine-week program is built around that shift. Your child moves from the smallest unit of life through the systems of the body, into how organisms behave and develop, and out to the ecosystems they live in — at each step learning to use evidence to explain what they see. Every concept gets attached to a concrete case: insulin being assembled and shipped by organelles, a bowerbird’s spring courtship display, the sixty-year wolf-and-moose study on Isle Royale, what happened to Yellowstone when wolves returned. The aim is a child who can argue scientifically about real biological problems, not just label a diagram.

Week 1 starts at the cell — what it is, why every textbook calls it the smallest unit of life, and what you see when you put onion skin under a microscope. Week 2 goes inside the cell to the organelles, and follows one specific protein (insulin) being assembled in the ribosomes, processed in the Golgi, and shipped out — the cell as a working system, not a labeled blob. Week 3 zooms out to the body. Digestion and respiration are studied as interacting subsystems, then watched in action when a kid climbs a flight of stairs and both systems ramp up on demand. Week 4 brings in the circulatory and nervous systems and shows how all four work together — including the half-second reflex when a hand touches a hot stove.

Behavior, Growth, and Ecosystems (Weeks 5-8)

Week 5 turns to animal behavior. Mating displays, parental care, territorial behavior, group living — your child learns to argue from evidence about how these behaviors increase reproductive success, with a bowerbird’s elaborate stage as one case study among several. Week 6 takes up growth. Same tomato seeds, different soil and sunlight, very different plants — separating the genetic factors from the environmental ones and explaining how they interact.

Week 7 widens to ecosystems. Resources limiting populations, food webs, competition, predator-prey relationships, symbiosis — anchored by the Isle Royale wolf-moose study that gives sixty years of population data to reason from. Week 8 asks what happens when something changes. Wolves were removed from Yellowstone, then restored, and the ecosystem changed in ways nobody predicted. Your child learns to argue from evidence about how physical and biological disruptions ripple through ecosystems.

Synthesis (Week 9)

Week 9 is the capstone. “One Story, Many Scales — Putting Life Science Together” pulls the entire course back together — from organelles to organ systems to organisms to ecosystems — and asks your child to demonstrate mastery across all standards by analyzing new scenarios and constructing evidence-based explanations.

Every week includes science readings, structured analysis questions, data interpretation, and full answer keys with teaching notes.