Mississippi Science ZOO.7.1
The Standard
- ZOO.7
- Students will understand the structure and function of phylum Chordata, classes Chondrichthyes and Osteichthyes, and how they demonstrate the characteristics of living things.
Students will understand why evolutionary changes lead to the diversity of fish and how they have adapted to the different aquatic environments.
2026 Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Standards for Science · Phylum Chordata, Classes Chondrichthyes and Osteichthyes
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students compare the body shapes, skeletons, and buoyancy structures of sharks, rays, and bony fish. They explain how inherited traits that help fish survive in different waters can become more common over generations.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can explain how a stingray’s flat body helps it live on the seafloor and a tuna’s streamlined body helps it swim in open water. They can identify cartilage in rays and bone in tuna, then explain how a helpful inherited trait can spread through a population.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may think an individual fish changes its body because it needs to. They may think sharks are the ancestors of modern bony fish, rather than a group that shares an older ancestor with them. They may also assume all fish have swim bladders.
How to Assess It
- Show a stingray on sand and a tuna in open water. Ask: “Name one body trait that helps each fish in its habitat. How could one of those traits become common over generations?”
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Sort printed stingray, tuna, and perch cards onto seafloor, open-ocean, and lake mats, then mark one helpful body trait on each.
Ask students to write why a flat body might help fish on the seafloor but make swimming harder in open water.
Give students trait bingo cards with swim bladder, cartilage, and flat body, then read fish clues and require an explanation before covering a square.
Use an aquarium’s online species pages to compare where a stingray and a tuna live and how each body shape helps it move.
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Printable ZOO.7.1 Worksheet
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Related Standards
- L.6.3
Students will demonstrate an understanding of the relationships between survival, environmental changes, and diversity as they relate to the interactions of org...
- MAQ.5
Students will explore the biodiversity and interactions among aquatic life.
- L.2.4
Students will demonstrate an understanding of the ways animals adapt to their environment in order to survive.
- FB.6
Students will understand the interdependence of living organisms and their environment.
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