Microorganisms

Open class with this Science Spotlight that gets middle schoolers reasoning about the living — and non-living — world too small to see. Students read four real scenarios and identify which microbe is at work: bacteria, virus, fungus, or protist.

An addition is the sort. Each case also gets classified as helpful or harmful, which directly confronts the common misconception that every microbe is a “germ.” Yogurt bacteria and bread yeast land on the helpful side; the flu virus and a malaria protist land on the harmful side — a clean, memorable split.

A four-term word bank does the scaffolding: the definitions make the nucleus the key clue (bacteria have none, protists have one), so the trickiest identification rewards close reading instead of guessing. A built-in text-evidence task has students underline the exact phrase that proves each answer, and the streamlined answer key shows every microbe type, the correct helpful/harmful chip, and the evidence highlighted in red.

Built for grades 6–8 and designed to support NGSS MS-LS1-1 (cells and single-celled life) with a CCSS literacy tie-in. Clean grayscale layout — just print and teach as a warm-up, exit ticket, or quick review.