Curriculum Overview
The Evolving Minds curriculum has been carefully designed as a complete, NGSS-aligned 12-unit sequence of lessons that progressively builds from basic concepts of natural selection toward more complex ideas. Each lesson plan can typically be covered in a 45-minute period.
The highly visual curriculum includes hands-on small group activities, class discussion, and animated storybooks that create a memorable narrative which helps students build and revise their model of natural selection. Lesson 12 is a final project where students integrate the concepts they’ve learned. Teachers with fewer science periods can conclude after Lesson 7. But we hope you’ll try all 12 lessons — and let us know what you think!
Engaging Hands-On Activities
Students get excited by the hands-on activities in the Evolving Minds Project curriculum. These include: closely examining snail shells and radish seedlings, counting and graphing data with sticky notes, storyboarding a video to retell the story, and observing fossils to consider links between species. All of these activities converge to provide multiple pathways to learning that reinforce foundational concepts, instill basic science practices, and help students develop and apply explanatory models.
Co-Designed with Teachers
Each EMP lesson was designed in partnership with experienced elementary school teachers from a broad range of backgrounds, then field-tested over several years in a variety of third grade classrooms. Teachers helped workshop the entire curriculum to ensure that materials and step-by-step instructions are all clear and easy-to-use. The result is an effective, turnkey curriculum that is simple and fun to teach, regardless of an instructor’s prior background in science.
Step-by-Step Teacher Materials
Most elementary school teachers are not trained as science specialists, and teaching unfamiliar concepts can be daunting. The EMP curriculum provides all the support teachers need. It has a comprehensive Teacher Guide as well as a a full resource package including: step-by-step lesson plans, handouts, video links, slide decks, student notebooks, learning assessment tools, and practical teaching tips. It’s all free - just sign up!
Free Curriculum, Low-Cost Supplies
The Project is committed to keeping the full EMP curriculum free to all and instructional supply costs as low as possible. EMP Curriculum Kit instructions save teachers time and money by offering links to low-cost sources for the supplies used in some lessons, as well as alternatives for printing free linked handouts. Sourcing tips came from teachers during the field-testing phase. The Project derives no financial benefit of any kind, and we ask teachers to continue sharing practical cost-saving tips with the EMP Community.
Standards-Aligned, Multi-Disciplinary
The EMS curriculum is fully aligned with NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) 3rd grade life science performance expectations, science practices (evidence-gathering, analysis, modeling), and cross-cutting concepts. It also meets common core math standards (representing data) and ELA literacy standards (comparing themes) as shown in this EMP Standards Alignment Chart. These all come together in a series of12 cohesive lesson plans that are engaging for students and fun and easy-to-use for teachers.
All 12 Lessons At-a-Glance
See an overview of the Big Idea and Class Activity for all 12 lessons. Check out a couple of sample lessons to see how they work. Then sign up for free access to the full curricu!um!
“I’m not one to get excited about teaching science — it’s not my thing. But with this curriculum, I felt really well prepared.”
- S.H., 3rd Grade Teacher