Overview

Young Minds Inspired recently released a FREE middle school mini-unit titled Biodiversity at Risk: Today’s Choices Matter. This lesson sequence is based on the NASEM Earth & Life Sciences report which you can find HERE.

The mini-unit activities encourage students to explore biodiversity, including what biodiversity is, how human activities are putting biodiversity at risk, and what we can do to protect biodiversity. The mini-unit features 4 activities. You can download each activity individually or as a set. The four activities are:

• Biodiversity 101
• Exploring Endangered Animals
• Biodiversity in Action
• Stand up for Biodiversity
• NOTE: Make sure you read the Teacher Guide…there are directions here that are not obvious from just the activity handouts above.

Ways to Use This

These types of free mini-units can be very useful objects of study and I use them in many ways. Obviously they can be used as supplemental instructional materials but they can also be used to help educators, administrators, pre service teachers, etc to learn about science instructional materials and ways to modify and improve them. Often, full instructional materials are overwhelming and unwieldy to quickly examine. These types of bite-sized instructional materials can be easier to analyze, review, and provide feedback on. I’m interested to hear back if anyone uses this set of lessons with teachers or students you support.