Science

About this course

Eighth grade is the bridge into high school science, and it is the most academically dense of the middle grades. Life science covers organelles, membrane transport by diffusion and osmosis, mitosis, Mendel's laws, DNA structure, and protein synthesis from transcription through translation, then bacteria, fungi, plant and animal diversity, and ecosystem services. The physical science units carry the chemistry load: atomic models through history, periodic trends, ionic and covalent bonding, chemical formulas and nomenclature, balancing equations, reaction types, acids and bases, solutions, organic carbon chemistry, and nuclear chemistry with alpha, beta, and gamma decay and half-life calculations. Astronomy is genuinely mathematical here, with Kepler's three laws, Newton's law of universal gravitation, stellar classification, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, the Milky Way, and the expanding universe. Earth science covers the interior layers, Wegener and plate tectonics, boundaries, the rock cycle, minerals, weathering, soil, water, and glaciers and ice ages. Separate units add all the body systems, a second lighter chemistry pass, a physics unit through waves, sound, light, electricity, and electromagnetism, and a stewardship unit.

The course is 144 lessons in 12 units of 12, each planned for about 45 minutes. The final four units re-teach the life, earth, physical, and space units from the start of the year in a second, denser set of lessons, so your student meets each of those fields twice with different writing. A lesson opens with a wonder question, teaches through headed sections with bolded vocabulary, worked calculations, and reference data, then moves to an observe-or-experiment step and a record-and-share step, and closes with a ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself. Homework is a written paragraph. Listed materials are pencil, paper, and crayons.

This is the year the creation position is argued rather than assumed, so you should know what is in it. Earth science devotes full lessons to Flood geology and to the young-earth creation model. The nuclear chemistry lesson gives standard half-lives and dating methods, then presents the RATE project's challenge to the assumption of constant decay rates. Astronomy devotes a lesson to the distant starlight problem and walks through four proposed young-earth answers, including mature creation, Humphreys's gravitational time dilation, c-decay, and relativistic cosmologies, and it says openly which of them creation scientists themselves consider weak. Reproduction is treated as a biology topic at the level of pollination, gametes, meiosis, and egg-laying versus live birth. Coming in, your student should read technical prose comfortably and handle exponents, ratios, and repeated halving.

What the course covers

• Cell organelles, transport, mitosis, Mendelian genetics, and protein synthesis
• Bacteria, fungi, plants, animal diversity, and ecosystems
• Earth's interior, plate tectonics, minerals, weathering, and glaciers
• Flood geology and the young-earth creation model
• Atomic structure, periodic trends, bonding, formulas, and equations
• Nuclear chemistry: radioactive decay, half-life, and radiometric dating
• Kepler's laws, universal gravitation, and the H-R diagram
• The Milky Way, the expanding universe, and the starlight problem
• Waves, sound, light, electricity, and electromagnetism
• Body systems, health, reproduction in plants and animals, and stewardship

What your student will be able to do

• Trace protein synthesis from DNA through mRNA to a finished protein
• Write chemical formulas and names and balance equations
• Calculate remaining quantity of an isotope across several half-lives
• Apply Kepler's laws and read a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
• Interpret rock strata and radiometric dates within a young-earth framework
• State the distant starlight problem and summarize the answers offered for it

Scope and sequence

All 12 units of Science for Grade 8, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 144 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 144 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.