A standards-based curriculum for high school students to go beyond the basics of biology

The Explore Biology Curriculum is a full-year biology course for high school students with limited reading abilities, including those with intellectual disability or autism.

The curriculum has six main components: Student Book, Student Workbook, Instructor’s Guide, Reference Guides, Study Cards, and Lab Materials.

The Student Book has 11 chapters, including a supplementary chapter. The chapters cover everything from ecology to complicated cellular processes, and even genetics. The supplementary chapter is a review of Attainment’s Explore Life Science. The curriculum covers crucial biological concepts, regardless of complexity, but presents them in a way that students can grasp. Each page is heavily illustrated with about 60 words per page so it can be easily read aloud to nonreaders. All chapters follow the same template: title page, four Big Ideas, major illustration, eight vocabulary words, chapter overview, topic pages, an In Focus topic, hands-on lab lesson, and a quiz. Important concepts learned in the book are often reinforced in many places to increase student understanding.

The Consumable Student Workbook corresponds to the Student Book and reduces teacher prep time. The workbook condenses all of the student activities from the Student Book into a consumable option. With this new consumable book, students have the opportunity to keep and share their accomplishments with peers, parents, and instructional staff.

The Instructor’s Guide provides detailed lesson plans for all 82 lessons. Each lesson covers two-four pages in the Student Book. The Instructor’s Guide gives talking points that relate to the topics. These add more information to a topic and ensure the lesson takes an appropriate amount of time. Ideally, a talking point leads to small group discussions or spurs other ideas.

Four Reference Guides are included and serve different purposes. Write About It functions as a lesson adaptation for a component of the quiz. Animations serve as a review. Special Molecules and Activities function as lesson extensions. The Activities reference guide has activities that help students grasp complicated topics.

Lab Materials are used for the Lab lesson in each chapter. Most labs have a component that is provided in the lab materials. Many of the labs use special cards for the activity. A high-quality Animal Cell Model is also included as a great hands-on tool to teach about cells!

Study Cards for every vocabulary word and Big Idea help with review. Vocabulary cards can be used for quiz and whenever the word is covered in the text.

Lastly, a flash drive provides PDFs of the Student Book pages, lab materials, term tests, reference guides, animations, and an Explore Biology image library. This image library can be used to create communication pages for students who are nonverbal.

The Curriculum includes: Student Book, consumable Student Workbook, Instructor’s Guide, 1 set of Reference Guides, 1 set of Study Cards, and 1 set of Lab Materials.