Evolution and inheritance
National curriculum content
- Recognise that living things have changed over time and that fossils provide information about living things that inhabited the Earth millions of years ago
- Recognise that living things produce offspring of the same kind, but normally offspring vary and are not identical to their parents
- Identify how animals and plants are adapted to suit their environment in different ways and that adaptation may lead to evolution
Lesson objectives
- Explain the timeline of the Earth up to the modern day
- Explain who Mary Anning was and why her discoveries are important to science
- Understand how some features are inherited
- Describe how living things have adapted to survive
- Explain how natural selection works using Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
- Explain how natural selection works using Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
What we want children to know
- How characteristics are passed form parents to their offspring
- Some evolutionary changes can be quick
- How variation over time makes animals less or more likely to survive
- The importance of Mary Anning and Charles Darwin and their ideas of evolution
What skills we want children to develop
- Develop an understanding of how life on Earth began and continued to evolve over time
- Highlight which traits have been inherited
- Name some ways in which species have evolved in order to survive
- Use Darwinian theory to describe changes in living things
Vocabulary
Adaptation, dinosaur, evolution, fossil, inheritance, inherited, natural selection, prehistoric, trait, variety