The curriculum is totally free. Some lesson plans call for low-cost items (e.g., radish seeds). These are listed in How to Make an EMP Curriculum Kit along with free alternatives linked in many lessons.

Yes, EMP is fully aligned with NGSS 3rd grade science education standards. It also hits some math and literacy standards, and ties them all together as shown in this Standards Alignment Grid.

Evolving Minds is a great no-cost supplement to science education curricula used in many school districts. It is not intended as a general curriculum, but focuses on core issues in biological science and establishing sound science principles and practices.

Extensive field-testing in elementary school classrooms, and years of rigorous research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, have shown that children as young as five can learn these concepts, retain what they learned, and apply the princples to new situations.

Not at all! Even teachers with minimal background in science find that Evolving Minds makes it easy to teach the core concepts. The curriculum provides everything teachers need to help their students learn and grow as scientists.

Kids love storybooks! Reading together builds connections and motivates learning. Our research shows that simple illustrations and memorable storylines also help children construct baseline understanding and coherent models and explanatory frameworks that lead to enduring learning. See this annotated bibliography for more about the research base undergirding the EMP curriculum.

Young students already have many ideas about familiar animals. Some of these ideas can act as powerful scaffolds to further biological understanding; other preconceptions interfere with building explanations for something new and complicated. By using species that are reality-based but unfamiliar, the storybooks help children grasp (and retain) the counterintuitive scientific explanation of how animals change over time.

Learning research shows that comparing and contrasting across multiple parallel cases (drawing analogies) helps children create a stronger foundation for understanding. It also helps them apply what they have learned to new and very different situations. The focus on revisiting core ideas, and supporting students in revising their initial notions, is one of the strengths of the EMP curriculum.

It is tempting to lead with flashy evolutionary questions: How are birds related to dinosaurs? How old is the earth?  But our research shows that children who first understand adaptation by natural selection (from the initial EMP lessons) are better able to understand “bigger” evolutionary ideas in later lessons — such as when they try to make sense of what fossils are, how ancient species lived, and where new species came from. This cohesive sequence of lessons and student learning gains is a hallmark of the EMP curriculum.

While longitudinal studies are not feasible, establishing scientifically accurate conceptual foundations at a young age can only help with later science learning.

Traditionally, natural selection is not taught until high school biology. By then, research shows, intuitive biases and scientific habits that make natural selection difficult to learn have begun to harden. This makes these challenging concepts even tougher to acquire.

Anecdotally, some students who took part in early EMP field tests tell us they still draw on the ideas they learned through the storybooks and materials when reasoning about evolution.

Evolving Minds features an extensive Teacher Guide to help instructors preview and plan each lesson. Six teaching support videos will be available later in 2025.

A quarterly Evolving Minds Update is also planned to summarize feedback, tips, and other insights contributed by the Community. Please let us know what might be helpful to you!

Funding for the Project has come from a series of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. Publication of the Piloses storybook and provision of free copies to low-resource schools was made possible by more than 200 donors to an earlier crowdfunding campaign.

With the curriculum now online, we hope to nurture a community of practitioners committed to high quality early science education. This will occur mainly through the quarterly Update and ongoing improvements to this website. But we’d love to hear your ideas!

To expand impact, we are exploring research collaborations in the UK, Europe, and beyond to test EMP materials and pursue translations of the storybooks and curriculum. We also hope to publish the Miroungas and Harpies storybooks in print form. Please send inquiries to Director@EvolvingMindsProject.org.