I fondly remember my Sci teacher solemnly giving us all a card as we entered the lab with a gene written on it. We were then told to breed with three others in the class and write down our offspring! When teaching inheritence, get kids to cut out pictures of different celebrities with different characteristics e.g ginger (chris evans) and blonde (billie) and mate them, and them get them to find their "offspring" in the magazines! HELLO/OK and HEAT would be particulary good for this! Might be an idea to check the content of the rest of the magazine though!
I fondly remember my Sci teacher solemnly giving us all a card as we entered the lab with a gene written on it. We were then told to breed with three others in the class and write down our offspring!
When teaching inheritence, get kids to cut out pictures of different celebrities with different characteristics e.g ginger (chris evans) and blonde (billie) and mate them, and them get them to find their "offspring" in the magazines! HELLO/OK and HEAT would be particulary good for this! Might be an idea to check the content of the rest of the magazine though!
Y11 genetics: pair of cardboard rolls to represent chromosomes with written instructions in bands e.g. give them Huntington's on one and "don't give them Huntington's" on the other, we voted on whether the person would get the disorder. That worked quite well and one pupil amazed me by suggesting that the alleles might blend each others effects.
I make marshmallow animals with my Year 11 group when teaching inheritance. My marshmallions are made up of marshmallow bodies, they have legs, antennae and tails made from "shoe laces" sweets, dolly mixture humps and clove eyes. Tell pupils that you have some animals to see. Bring out a "marshmallion" - usually best cupped in your hand and act like it is a real animal (kids normally think you have finally lost it at this point) Talk through the features that the parent has and then show pupils the alleles present e.g. Bb may code for three body parts etc. Give each pupil a set of "chromosomes". Probably about 8 different pairs each with one gene for a particular feature. They turn over chromosomes, pair them up and pick on from each pair (to represent meiosis). Then they find someone to "reproduce with" and join together their haploid set of chromosomes (fertilisation) and then from the alleles they have, they then build their marshmallion baby. You will obviously need to see what sweets you can get hold of before making your chromosome. But if the kids are given exactly the same set of chromosomes to start off with, it illustrates how sexual reproduction leads to variation really nicely as all the babies are usually different from each other. You will need to use cocktail sticks to join the body parts together. I let the kids build them on paper plates and they can eat them afterwards. Every class I have done it with has really enjoyed it.
This takes some time to prepare but works really well once set up. First, get some 'stock' characteristics, probably cartoony type faces etc. Draw/trace onto transparencies using bright colours etc, e.g. different hair, eye, nose, mouth, ear shapes and different skin tones. Each should be on the same sized square of transparency so you can overlay them. Place a complete set in an envelope for each pupil, male and female envelopes. They can choose the characteristics for their 'parent'. Flipping a coin for heads and tails, they each (mom and dad) in a pair add a characteristic to their 'offspring'. They should decide (i.e. tales for dad and heads for mom) who adds the characteristic - the partners should systematically decide which characteristic they are flipping for, maybe building the face from the hair down for example. Pupils can make as many offspring as time allows. Also funny when they start interbreeding with other groups and making a family. Get a record of this through diagrams in books for a view a the 'family album'. a couple of variations on producing offspring: 1) Get the students to draw 1 male cartoon face and 1 female cartoon face. Toss a coin to decide if the child gets the feature from mother or father and they draw it. I always make sure the last decision is whether the child is male or female....Makes for more amusing looking kids! 2) Depending on your class...Get students to volunteer without telling them why. Then pick 1 boy and 1 girl and get the class to describe what their child might look like.