CSI

Show students a picture regarding witness information (as described on Science Trek's CSI Facts page). Then remove the picture and have them talk about what they saw in the picture. Have them describe details about the scene. When they have finished discussing, reexamine the picture and talk about how accurate their descriptions were.

Have a teacher or other staff member interrupt the classroom with some type of confusion. Include something that is sure to get many students' attention, such as yelling or a whistle being blown. Then the intruding teacher should leave the room. Following this event, have students act as witnesses to the event and write about it. When students have completed their writing, repeat the interruption exactly, and compare what they wrote to the event that took place. Discuss the experience of being a witness and why some information gets missed.

Stage a fake crime in your classroom, lunchroom, gym or other place that can be witnessed by your class. Following this event, have students write about what they witnessed. When students have completed their writing, compare what they wrote to the event that took place. Discuss the experience of being a witness and why some information gets missed.

Recognizing that shadows cast by a criminal or by a piece of evidence can help to identify its shape, play with the shadows of various 3D shapes to see if any of them produce the same shadow, even when they are not the same shape.

Complete the unknown-substance experiment as outlined in Who Dunnit: Powders. Measure amounts in terms of milliliters, half-teaspoons and quarter-teaspoons. 

The length of a person's foot can identify their height. Try this measurement activity to solve which footprints belong to whom. Find instructions and resources at Who Dunnit: Foot To Height.

Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive.

• Inheritance of Traits • Young animals are very much, but not exactly, like their parents. Plants also are very much, but not exactly, like their parents.

• Variation of Traits • Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways.

• Many characteristics of organisms are inherited from their parents.

• Different organisms vary in how they look and function because they have different inherited information.

• Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory. respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.

• Examples of structures could include thorns, roots, colored petals, heart, stomach, lung, brain, and skin.

Local, regional, and global patterns of rock formations reveal changes over time due to earth forces, such a s earthquakes. The presence and location of certain fossil types indicate the order in which rock layers were formed.

Measurements of a variety of properties can be used to identify materials.

Matter of any type can be subdivided into particles that are too small to see, but even then the matter still exists and can be detected by other means.

• Each pure substance has characteristic physical and chemical properties that can be used to identify it.

• Substances react chemically in characteristic ways.

• The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth's history.

• Emphasis is on how analyses of rock formations and the fossils they contain are used to establish relative ages of major events in Earth's history.

Emphasis is on finding patterns of changes in the level of complexity and the chronological order of fossil appearance in the rock layers.

Variations of inherited traits between parent and offspring arise from genetic differences that result from the subset of chromosomes (and therefore genes) inherited.

Genes are located chiefly in the chromosomes of the cells, with each chromosome pair containing two variants of each of many distinct genes. Each distinct gene chiefly controls the production of specific proteins, which in turn affects the traits of the individual.

In multicellular organisms, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues and organs that are specialized for particular body functions.