Infectious Respiratory Disease

Appendix on Implementing District Standards

Delaware standards for science set clear goals for what students should access and learn in science by the end of each grade year. In 2013, Delaware adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which sets the end-of-year expectations for each grade as students progress towards college and career readiness. These standards ask students to make sense of phenomena and solve problems using three dimensions of science: disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and scientific practices. Additionally, NGSS focuses on learning skills and concepts in the context of solving real-world problems.⁴⁹ These Delaware-adopted NGSS standards for 6th-grade life science align with this influenza unit’s topics and objectives:

1. MS-LS1-3: Use arguments supported by evidence for how the body is a system of interacting subsystems composed of groups of cells.

   Students will discover through guided research how viruses replicate in living cells. It helps students understand how viruses like influenza affect the respiratory and immune systems. They will explain how the flu virus enters the respiratory subsystem, infecting cells and triggering immune responses

2. MS-LS1-8: Gather and synthesize information that sensory receptors respond to stimuli by sending messages to the brain for immediate behavior or storage as memories.

   This standard supports understanding symptoms and infection responses. Students will deduce from their personal experience with dealing with influenza about the symptoms and how their bodies respond to infections such as the flu. It connects how the body perceives infection (fever, cough) and reacts to flu symptoms by sending signals to the brain.

3. MS-LS2-1 through MS-LS2-5: These focus on populations and ecosystems.

Students will also learn through research and viewing videos about previous pandemics, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic, how disease spreads in populations, and how public health strategies work as design solutions to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services, similar to controlling infection spread in human communities. Students to model how flu spreads in a population and plan public health design solutions like vaccination, handwashing, masking, and school closures to reduce community-level infection rates.