Blog Post Week 7

 Week 7

At the beginning of class, we looked at our fast plants, again. This time, most of them were dying! Last week the flowers were bright, colorful, and tall. This week they are droopy, dried out, and brown. I'm assuming our plants began to die because we haven't watered them. This has been fun to witness a whole life cycle of a plant!

  

Last week we looked at natural and human factors that affected animals and their habitats, most specifically turtles in lab. In lecture last week we began learning about genetics and DNA, we also reviewed this at the beginning of class before we continued this lesson in lab. We learned in a video we watched that there are 20 different kinds of amino acids. We also reviewed central dogma, which is the process of converting DNA into protein. The three stages of central dogma are (1) DNA replication to recreate the original copy.  Then is (2) transcription mRNA needs to deliver info to amino acids and finally (3) translation, where RNA turns into protein.

We then took our new knowledge and applied it in an activity where we built a double-helix pattern out of Dots and Twizzlers to make DNA. The components of a nucleotide are the phosphate group, sugar, and nitrogen base. We assigned colors to specific dots so we could create the nitrogen-based pairs. We assigned red and orange to the thymine and adenine pair, and green and yellow to the guanine and cytosine pair. The Twizzlers were used as the backbone. This is a super fun activity that would be very engaging for students! I think it also makes the concept of DNA easier to understand as a real, complex thing for young students. 

Then we did the baby lab which explored a simplified version of our genetic makeup. This is an activity I think would be great for upper elementary students. It demonstrates how many different factors come into play for even just one feature, such as your skin or eye color. This lab was interactive and represented the 50/50 chance that is created by two parents. It also really explored the difference between genotype and phenotype which I think is great because it is something young students may find confusing. 

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