Imagine you have a big box of toys, and they are all a little bit different. Some are red, some are blue, some are green, and they all have their own unique features. Evolution works in a similar way with living things. All animals and plants have small differences that make them unique.
When these toys make baby toys, just like when animals have babies, the baby toys inherit traits from their parents. A red toy might make red baby toys. This is similar to how children often look like their parents. In evolution, this passing of traits from parents to offspring is called inheritance. It's a key part of how evolution works.
Now, imagine there's a game where only the fast toys can get to the finish line and make more baby toys. The slow toys don't make it. This is like natural selection in evolution. In nature, animals with traits that help them survive - like being fast enough to escape predators - are more likely to live long enough to have babies. Those that don't have helpful traits might not survive to reproduce.
After playing this game for a very, very long time - like millions of years in real evolution - you'll have mostly fast toys in your box. This is because only the fast ones kept making babies. In the beginning, maybe only 20% of toys were fast. After many generations, that might increase to 60%, and eventually to 80% or more. This gradual change in the population over time is what we call evolution. It happens very slowly, but over long periods, it can lead to big changes.
Let's summarize what we've learned about evolution. First, all living things have small differences that make them unique, just like our different colored toys. Second, parents pass their traits to their offspring through inheritance. Third, natural selection favors traits that help organisms survive and reproduce. Fourth, over many generations, these helpful traits become more common in the population. And finally, evolution is a very slow process that occurs over millions of years, gradually changing species over time. This is how the amazing diversity of life on Earth has developed!