Welcome to your Honors Biology class! I am excited to serve as your coach for using science skills to connect to your world. My main priority is to ensure you experience many different strategies for understanding what lives around us. You are already starting to build your own future. Wherever you are in life, I want you to have all the tools possible to make up your own minds.

We will use biology like a language for describing and explaining what we observe. Through our activities, I want to help you build the confidence to use science to better understand and change the living systems that affect those we care about. During this school year we will be using a virtual schedule. We will collaborate to create a shared understanding for how the living world works. We will make mistakes together, not alone. We will use safe experiments and activities at home to:

• Analyze how complex actions affect the environment, human quality of life, and biodiversity in small and big ways

• Predict how change happens through small and big shifts in populations and complex systems like the human body or the climate crisis

• Design & implement your own experiments and daily observations of a living environment of your choice, to analyze a relationship or answer a question you propose

Topics covered this year include:

Unit 1: Cell Structure and Function

Unit 2: DNA and Inheritance

Unit 3: Evolution and Natural Selection

Unit 4: Ecology

Unit 5: Human Impact in the Environment