Living, or non-living?

NGSS Phenomena:
Students in your classroom are conducting an experiment, to determine if something is living or not. Their teacher gives them the following image to look at and asks them to work as a group to decide whether or not the phenomena they observe in the image is alive or not.


Each student takes a sample from the object their teacher gives them and they look at these samples under a microscope. Use the 4 images below to answer the questions.
NGSS Phenomena: 4 images of different slides. Slide A has mostly round and rectangular shapes that appear mostly green. Slide B looks similar to slide A, but also contains a few larger shapes. Slide C has some round green shapes, but also oval gray and red shapes and red slivers. Slide D contains the same shapes as slide D, but some shapes appear slightly lighter.

1. While you and your classmates are looking at these images, the best way to determine that something is living is to find it’s made of .

Drag the answers below into the grey placeholders above

tissues
organs
cells
atoms

2. Looking at the images, one of your classmates makes the following claim:

“This is not from only one living thing, because there are many different colors and shapes of cells in the slides. Cells in a living thing should look the same, so these must be images of different types of living things”

This student’s claim is because cells inside one organism.

Drag the answers below into the grey placeholders above

incorrect
can be many different shapes
correct
are always the same shape

3. While analyzing the images, one of your classmates makes the following statement:

“We don’t have enough information to determine whether or not there is a living thing in the images. Even though the image looks like cells, we need to see the larger organism to see if it moves and if it grows over time.”

How is the data that she collected relevant to the investigation?

4. One of your classmates decides on the following investigation plan:

In order to see if the images in the slides are alive, we’ll need to investigate that some of them are made of cells. We’ll view the images and look at as many different structures as we can to decide if they’re cells. As long as we find that some of the parts of the image are cells, we’ll be able to decide that it’s alive or not. If we don’t find any cells, then we can say it is not alive.

What would you do to revise the investigation plan to be more relevant and to generate more accurate and precise data?

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This matching question aligns to the following standards

  • LS1.A: Structure and Function

  • MS-LS1-1

This matching question aligns to the following standards

  • MS-LS1-1

  • LS1.A: Structure and Function

  • Planning and Carrying Out Investigations

This free response question aligns to the following standards

  • MS-LS1-1

  • Scale, Proportion, and Quantity

  • LS1.A: Structure and Function

  • Planning and Carrying Out Investigations

This free response question aligns to the following standards

  • MS-LS1-1

  • Scale, Proportion, and Quantity

  • LS1.A: Structure and Function

  • Planning and Carrying Out Investigations

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