Congratulations! You’re Grandparents!
11/3/2017
If you were to walk down the hallway to the science lab, you would see 77 beautiful pet babies! They were all “born” last week and seem to be thriving - even though they are stapled to the wall! While the seventh and eighth graders seemed to have fun with this project, serious learning took place behind each of their baby’s designs. A few weeks ago, at a parent lunch, both student and parent created a “pet.” This pet had no specific design except that it had to display 6 particular traits in one of two forms. For example, it had to either have pointy or floppy ears, a tail or no tail, square or round eyes, and so on. The pets were created with their designers’ personal touch. As you can imagine, the variety from this creative group did not disappoint! (Caution: biology terms ahead.) It was only after the parent lunch that the students learned which traits were controlled by dominant or recessive alleles. Since those phenotypes were plainly visible, students had to determine the genotypes. Students knew that if a trait was recessive, it had to be homozygous - so those genotypes were easy. However, for the dominant traits, students had to flip a penny to randomly select the genotype as either homozygous or heterozygous. (Are you still with me?) Switch momentarily to social studies. Think awkward middle school dance. Yup, all the student pets met up and awkwardly paired off with the pets made by parents in a random selection. (Yes, I know. Natural selection would have been more scientifically correct, but this is middle school and I didn’t want them to actually fight over the cutest parent pet!) Once paired, these middle schoolers were tasked with making six offspring, which they took very seriously! Back to science. For each pet baby trait, students had to make a Punnett square to show the probability of the allele sets when the parents’ genotypes were crossed. Then, they rolled a die which selected the Punnett square quadrant from which to select the allele set. Once all of these were determined, students had to make the babies according to their newly combined genotypes reflecting the crosses from the parents. And, voila! The basics of genetics understood. Comments are closed.
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Sarah Mariner
Ms. Mariner earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Science from Colorado State University, and was awarded a teaching certificate through the University of Alaska, Southeast. Her varied background includes being an environmental education field instructor in Massachusetts, Colorado, and Baja, Mexico. She also served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. Archives
April 2021
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