It’s the longest field trip ever for Ms. Frizzle’s class! In the latest installment in the popular Magic School Bus series, a classroom activity involving the construction of family trees leads to a 3.5-billion-year excursion, tracing the human lineage from the primordial cell through the first vertebrates to mammals, primates, hominins, and, finally, Homo sapiens. “We may speak different languages, eat different food, make different art, and have different religions,” Ms. Frizzle observes toward the end of the journey. “But we are all human beings with the same family tree” (p. 45). (The message is reinforced by the inclusion on the field trip of a cousin of one of the students, visiting from China.) The students then work together to construct a “terrific”—and charming, if selective—phylogenetic chart.

The approach of beginning with the familiar idea of a family tree and then introducing the idea of common ancestry is ideal...

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