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All living organisms, regardless of how they get their own food, need to carry out cellular respiration in order to harness the energy from that food. In this instructional sequence, students will experiment with a very simple organism that carries out cellular respiration, design a new experiment using the same materials, and analyze problems based scenarios based on what they learned. The sequence allows teachers to build in opportunity to focus on Experimental Design, Graphing and Diagramming Skills, in addition to topics in Cellular Respiration.

The circulatory and respiratory systems work together in a dynamic way to maintain oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the human body. Students will engage with content through the New York State Making Connections Lab. In terms of the marathon runner mystery/problem, students may think that the runner died because of a heart attack or overexertion in some way. This instruction should help them see why the evidence doesn't support that conclusion.

Stable ecosystems are complex and dynamic systems that rely on the interconnectedness between organisms and between organisms and their environment. In this sequence, students explore the components and organization of ecosystems, how energy flows through food chains and webs, and how nutrients are cycled to maintain life.

In this 5E sequence, students learn that diabetes is a failure of homeostasis and explore the multiple causes behind the rise in type II diabetes and how some diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer) have a complex epidemiology.

Ecosystems can return to dynamic equilibrium after a natural or human-caused disruption. After a disruption, ecosystems proceed through a process that may return them to their initial state or to a new equilibrium based on the complexity of the ecosystem and the nature of the disturbance. In this sequence, students explore different examples of disturbances and how ecosystems recover and change from these events.

The history of the Earth is filled with environmental changes, extinction events, and the evolution of a diversity of organisms. In this sequence, students explore the process of adaptation through natural selection and how this compares to the individual acclimatization of organisms in a changing environment in order to gain a better understanding of how life on Earth will adjust (or not!) to global changes such as human-caused climate change.

Because the endocrine system is involved in the regulation of blood glucose, through the hormones insulin and glucagon, this is a slightly more complex topic than thermoregulation. Also, students may know of insulin as part of the treatment for diabetes. In this unit, however, we are only looking at insulin in terms of its role in maintaining homeostasis. The disruption of homeostasis in diabetics comes up in the next unit.

One example of homeostasis in humans is thermoregulation?the maintenance of core body temperature within a narrow range. Many mechanisms exist in the human body to make it possible for temperature to stay within a narrow range, close to 98.6oF; very high and very low temperatures indicate a disruption in homeostasis.

New species may be introduced into ecosystems by accident or for a specific purpose. Some of these introduced species will become invasive, others cause little disruption or fail to establish themselves. Due to increased competition or predation some invasive species may have devastating effects on ecosystems. In this instructional sequence, students explore a data set in order investigate the impacts of the introduction of the zebra mussel on the Hudson River.

Finding solutions to complex global concerns such as human-caused climate change will require coordination between stakeholders at multiple levels, and the innovative use of technology. In this sequence, students review the causes behind important environmental concerns, and explore specific actions that can be taken to address or mitigate the impacts of climate change and the overconsumption of natural resources.

Enzymes are protein molecules that have several functions. They can break down other molecules (digest), put molecules together (synthesis), as well as speed up chemical reactions. In this 5Es sequence students will observe enzyme functioning at different temperatures, and model optimal conditions for their enzyme using a simulation. They will then graph their data and use scientific language to describe their results.