Why are living things different from one another? This unit on genetics starts out with students noticing and wondering about photos of two cattle, one of whom has significantly more muscle than the other. Students figure out how muscles typically develop as a result of environmental factors such as exercise and diet. Then, they work with cattle pedigrees, including data about chromosomes and proteins, to figure out genetic factors that influence the heavily muscled phenotype and explore selective breeding in cattle.

This unit is part of the OpenSciEd core instructional materials for middle school.

In the explorable explanation players can learn how antibiotic resistance happens. They can interact with bacteria in this simulation to learn how when living things reproduce, there is a small amount of variance in their offspring. This allows organisms to respond to changes in their environment over several generations. Applied to bacteria, when they treated with antibiotics, only the strongest survive and multiply, creating an increasing resilient population.

Students reinforce their knowledge that DNA is the genetic material for all living things by modeling it using toothpicks and gumdrops that represent the four biochemicals (adenine, thiamine, guanine, and cytosine) that pair with each other in a specific pattern, making a double helix. They investigate specific DNA sequences that code for certain physical characteristics such as eye and hair color. Student teams trade DNA "strands" and de-code the genetic sequences to determine the physical characteristics (phenotype) displayed by the strands (genotype) from other groups. Students extend their knowledge to learn about DNA fingerprinting and recognizing DNA alterations that may result in genetic disorders.

Students will breed fruit flies through several generations and record their data using mathematical models in order to demonstrate the inheritance of trait variations.

Students perform an activity similar to the childhood “telephone” game in which each communication step represents a biological process related to the passage of DNA from one cell to another. This game tangibly illustrates how DNA mutations can happen over several cell generations and the effects the mutations can have on the proteins that cells need to produce. Next, students use the results from the “telephone” game (normal, substitution, deletion or insertion) to test how the mutation affects the survivability of an organism in the wild. Through simple enactments, students act as “predators” and “eat” (remove) the organism from the environment, demonstrating natural selection based on mutation.

I want my students to have a background knowledge on where genetics came from, I want my students to know why genetics are so important today. Genetics is something that is always evolving and happening everyday without us thinking about it.

On lesson Plan day 2 I want my student to know the four different stage and be able to explain the stages back to me after watching the video. I want them to understand how it affects our lives today, what does it do for us.

Lesson Plan day 3 I want my students to understand meiosis and be able to explain what they just watched. I want the students to understand why meiosis is so important to our bodies.

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