This project asks students to create a creature and their genes to learn the differences between Mendelian genetics, incomplete dominance, co-dominance, multiple alleles, and x-linked traits. Students have gotten really creative with this project when I have used it in my classroom. I have seen Pig-Sharks, Mermaids, Pencils, and more as creatures. While it allows students to be creative it still requires them to learn the content. It gives them creative freedom, but holds them to high standards. This project is designed for PreAP or AP level, but could be modified by adjusting the rubric.
Make ecology come to life by having students create their own fictional ecosystem.
Students will demonstrate their understanding of ecology by creating a fictional ecosystem complete with plants and animals. They will show how plants and animals have adapted to their ecosystem, how they interact with one another (symbiosis), which organisms eat which (food chains and food webs), how their ecosystem formed over time (ecological succession), and how mater travels through their ecosystem (biogeochemical cycles)
Students will breed imaginary cats using real Mendelian genes to gain an understanding of how meiosis influences genetic variation in offspring. Students will select and write the alleles of their cats on paper chromosomes, cut them out and recombine them with another cat’s chromosomes.
These two self-guided lessons cover photosynthesis and cellular respiration. They work well when used together. Students will learn about the light and dark reaction in the Photosynthesis Self-Paced Lesson and glycolysis, Krebs cycle, and the electron transport chain in the Cellular Respiration Self-Paced Lesson.
Why lecture when you could play a game?
In this board game students will play as a virus trying to infect more cells. Each student plays a different type of virus with different stats. Some viruses can go into the lysogenic cycle while others are stuck in the lytic cycle.
Whenever I use this resource in my class students are always excited to play. As they play the game they learn about the stages of viral reproduction and the difference between the lytic and lysogenic cycles. It is a great introductory tool or review game.
This product includes a two page worksheet and a two page introduction.
For the worksheet, the first page has students color a food web with only the terms producer, herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore. This is to get students thinking about the trophic levels each organism occupies. After that, students color an abstract food web with shapes instead of actual organisms. If students can color the abstract food web correctly, they will understand how food webs work.
The second page has students drawing arrows again to remind them that the arrows show the direction of movement (a common misunderstanding). Then they will fill in the trophic levels of a food web.
