Look inside the Life Science pack.
No sign-up, no email required. Here is a real week, a real rubric, a real lab-notebook page, and a real demonstration — the actual materials, not a brochure. Every sample links to the full artifact it’s drawn from.
One week, two days on what’s alive.
The course runs on a two-day pulse — about two hours a day, across roughly 32 weeks. Here is week one of Unit 1 — Characteristics & Needs of Living Things: the student observes living things for real before a single definition is memorized.
- Living, once-living & never-living
- The shared traits of life
- What living things need to survive
- Use a hand lens well
- Record words & labeled sketches
- Separate observation from guess
How “mastered” is actually judged.
Every skill is scored at one of three levels against a published bar — no points, no curve. Here is one criterion from the Characteristics & Needs of Living Things rubric — lab technique: observing & recording — shown exactly the way a parent or guide reads it:
| Level | What it looks like — “Observe & record what you see” |
|---|---|
| Developing | Rushes the observation or writes down guesses instead of what is seen. |
| Proficient | Observes carefully but records vaguely or skips the hand lens. |
| Mastery | Uses a hand lens well, records clear observations in words and labeled sketches, and separates what they saw from what they think. |
Browse the full rubric set → · How this becomes an A–F grade →
The artifact a student builds, keeps, and defends.
The lab notebook isn’t busywork — it’s the primary record, kept in pen at the bench and defended out loud. Here is one real day at the bench, every section kept live — note the struck-through slip and the honest sources of error.
| What I saw | Moving? |
|---|---|
| round green cells | no |
| long green strands | no |
| fast darting speck | yes |
| slow crawling blob | yes |
- Dated & titled entries
- A question & prediction, written first
- Units on every number
- Honest about how sure you are
- Labeled sketches, not just pretty
- Pen in real time — struck, not erased
- Notes on what could be off — with direction
The moment that can’t be faked.
Three times a year, a student performs and defends a demonstration — standing with their own work and reasoning aloud while an adult asks unscripted follow-ups. In the microscope cell defense, they find, focus, and identify cells and their structures under the microscope, and explain what each part does.
“This is an onion-skin cell. The box-like wall around it means it’s a plant cell, the dark dot is the nucleus that controls the cell, and the big clear space is the vacuole holding water.”
A passing answer from the microscope cell defense — identifying the cell and explaining what each part does, not naming parts from a diagram.
The whole pack, ready for a binder.
Everything here is on the web to read — and every rubric, checklist, and guide also has a print-ready packet version, formatted 8.5×11 for a clipboard or a three-ring binder. You assemble the student’s binder from the pack itself; there’s nothing else to buy to hold it in your hands. We’ve put them all in binder order on one page: Assemble the Life Science binder →
Seen enough to start?
The whole Life Science pack is open to read and print. Open it and begin, or ask us a question first — a real person answers.