I've described the immune system trading cards that my honors biology class makes here. We are remote this week, and we were ready to work on our trading cards. Fortunately, part of the activity is digital anyway. The adjustment that was needed was getting the illustrations onto the cards.
Usually we pass the cards around and each of the students illustrates their word on every other student's cards. That part is impossible when we are all remote. To adjust, I had each student illustrate their word by hand, take a picture and insert it into the document. I also gave them the option to illustrate the word digitally, they just couldn't copy and paste from the internet. The class was split fairly evenly, with half of the students illustrating by hand and the other half used Google Drawings to put their illustration together.
Some of our cards from this week.
After we finish the cards, when we are in class, I have them storyboard the immune response to an infection on our lab tables with characters of the immune system that I give them and chalk markers. This time, I put the characters in Google Slides and asks the students to story board in Slides. I love the bird's eye view I get of them working in Slides (even though I can't see all of the students when they are in breakout rooms. It was so much fun watching their storyboards coming together in real time. It allowed me to see some misconceptions as well and address them with the class.
In my Honors Biology class, when we are studying disruptions of homeostasis we do an antibiotic resistance game lab from New Vision's Living Environment curriculum. It's a fairly simple lab...just requiring colored disks and a die. It gives students a very visual way to see how inconsistent taking of antibiotics can affect the bacteria in their bodies.
This coming week, we're remote to mitigate any COVID spread after Christmas break, so I needed to convert the antibiotics lab to a remote version. Google Slides are one of my favorite tools when we're remote since I can see what all of my students are doing, even when they are in breakout rooms. I made slides for each breakout room with plenty of virtual disks. On the slide itself is the number of disks lab groups need to begin with. There are piles of spares on the side to use as needed.
Students will put their data into a shared Google Sheet and graph the data as well. I purposely left one of the tables filled in and highlighted to remind me to review with students that they need to add more bacteria after each day.
I have also adjusted the lab document from New Visions to fit my class. I'll link the lab, the Slides and Sheet below.
I had just begun our unit on Genetics, Biotechnology, and Decision Making in Honors Biology when school closed and we transitioned to home learning via Zoom. The labs I do for this unit did not transition well to having students complete them at home.
As we got closer to the time that we would have gone over electrophoresis and done the Relationships and Biodiversity Lab (required to be completed for the New York Living Environment Regents Exam) I felt like I needed to put something together so that my students could get an idea of how electrophoresis works and to somehow do the lab. Of course, since then the June Regents exam has been canceled, but I actually like this lab and am glad my students had a chance to go through it.
The first activity that we did was designed to give them a "hands-on" feel for electrophoresis. I lead them through it with this google slides show. After students made their paper DNA sequence and cut them with their restriction enzyme, I asked students to count their base pairs and use the annotate feature in zoom to draw their DNA bands where they belong. Everyone had their initials over one of the wells, so they knew where to draw their bands. I loved how the electrophoresis gel looked when they finished annotating.
The next day we tackled the Relationships and Biodiversity Lab. Students had access to the NY lab in google doc format through Google Classroom and I also shared this Google Slides presentation with them to walk them through each of the 7 tests on the lab. Some of the slides I copied from other teachers' presentations, I found a video on YouTube of a teacher explaining the paper chromatography test, and one day that I was allowed into the building for 15 minutes, I made a video of the enzyme test.
Students asked plenty of questions, but once they were in their breakout rooms, they got to work. I popped into the rooms to check on them and answered a few more questions, mainly about how to mark the DNA bands in the lab. They did a great job with them. Of course, it wasn't as fun as doing it in person, but I think students got a picture of the concepts that the lab hits on.
Last week in Analytical Biology (Honors Bio), we began our Comparative Reproduction Unit. To get us doing some comparing, we did Mission 1 and Mission 2 of the NOVA Labs Evolution Lab. After watching a brief video and answering a few questions, students are off to building phylogenetic trees based on similarities and differences between different organisms.
The kids loved it, as it is set up more like a game than studying. I like that you can try out your tree and if it doesn't work (if dots fall off of the tree), you can readjust and try again. You can also click on the magnifying glass icon to get more information about the organisms you are trying to compare. This information is helpful for knowing how to put the tree together.
Although I only asked them to complete the first two missions, many students went on to the other missions--even though they covered topics that we haven't seen yet, namely DNA similarities to build trees. One student asked permission if she could complete all of the missions on her own. Of course!
One of the relationships they were surprised about was that a fungus was more closely related to animals than to plants. It led to some discussions about heterotrophs and autotrophs.
I set up a classroom in mypbslearningmedia.org and then could push out the assignment to my students through Google Classroom. The process isn't perfectly smooth, but all of my students found their way into the missions without too much help, and several students helped others to navigate their way in.
As students get further into the trees, they get more complicated. There is certainly some frustration as the trees get more difficult, but one student will figure it out and their celebration of figuring it out tends to encourage others to press on.
There are questions throughout to keep students focused on the learning that's happening. it also gives them an introduction to cladograms that they will have to interpret on the Regents exam in June, so that's another plus for this activity.
As we were reviewing for the Living Environment Regents exam at the end of the year in Analytical Biology, I was trying to keep it interesting. To help students review the concepts behind the four required labs for the exam, I decided to put together a Breakout that required students to recall these lab ideas.
There were diagrams to reference around the room, a directional maze, a story involving colors of indicators, a cladogram to interpret, and diagrams of the beaks of finches.
This gave students a fun way to be reminded of these key labs that we had done through the lab, with a little fun competition thrown in. The competition was primarily against the clock, but since they were divided into three teams, they were also hoping to be the first team to break their reward out.
Near the end of the school year, I had been chatting with the other teacher in my school who teaches Living Environment. We were discussing the time we would have to review in class before the Regents exam and how we wanted it to be engaging. Then that weekend, as I was scrolling through posts from the AP Biology Facebook group, I saw a picture from a teacher whose students were playing review "Spoons".
I loved this game growing up (actually, I still enjoy it!). The aim of the game is to get 4 matching cards in your hand and then to quietly take a spoon from the center of the table. The last person to notice the spoons have been taken loses. (There is one less spoon on the table than there are players around the table.) If I remember right, each time you are the player without a spoon, you get a letter and once you have spelled the word "SPOONS" you are out of the game. There is a draw pile of cards by the dealer, who keeps picking up one card and passing it on, and it continues around the table. The rule is that you may not have more than 4 cards in your hand at one time (you will have 5 temporarily while you are deciding which one to pass on).
The teacher on Facebook, had made cards involving terminology from photosynthesis and respiration. There was a word card, a picture card, and a description card. In the review game, students had 3 cards in their hands, and once they had 3 matching cards, they could take a spoon.
Since I wanted to do this for my Honors Biology class I made my own set of cards. There are 6 cards related to photosynthesis, 6 for cellular respiration, and 6 for the immune system. Students will need to get 4 related cards to be able to take a spoon. To make a "deck" of cards, I made two copies of each sheet on cardstock, laminated them, and cut them out.
The students loved it! They did find it a challenge to decide which were respiration vs. photosynthesis, but the immune system cards were much easier since they were so different than respiration and photosynthesis. Maybe next year, I'll add another topic--like types of cells and organelles to add a little more challenge.
Toward the end of the school year, I was perusing Pinterest and came across a blog post called "Where have you been all my life Structure Strips!?" This caught my eye because the structure strip on the left hand side of the page contained a main idea, some key words and key concepts. Although this was to guide student writing for history, I immediately saw an application for note-taking in my Honors Biology class.
One of the skills I want my students to develop in this class is the ability to read a text and take notes. This skill becomes more and more valuable as students move on academically. Up to this point, I was asking my students to do modified Cornell notes as they read selections from their textbook based on a main idea I gave them to put at the top of their page of notes. Afterward, I would give them a list of disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) from NGSS or enduring understandings (EUs) from NYSSLS and they had to pick which page of notes those statements would go with. As the year went on, several students began getting the hang of outlining the most important information, but many students were just making a list of bold words and writing the definitions. They needed more guidance.
For the last unit of the year, Ecology, I gave them my own structure strips to guide their note-taking. After cutting each page into the four strips and gluing each of them into four different pages of their notebooks, I told students to use the main idea, key vocabulary, and included DCIs or EUs to help them decide what from the reading should actually go in their notes. This way, they were not guessing about what was the most important information in the section they were reading in their textbook.
As we approached the end of the unit, I asked one of my students (who had been doing fairly well with the Cornell style) what she thought of the structure strips. She answered that she like them better than the Cornell notes because she felt like using the structure strips gave her more freedom in how she took her notes. Overall, I felt students notes were getting closer to the key ideas in the text that they needed to be focusing on. I forgot to take a picture of any of my students notes though, so I don't have any student examples. Oops!
Here are links to each set of structure strips for the seven units we do in Honors Biology:
(The numbers under the main idea are the chapter and sections from their textbook, Pearson's Concepts and Connections, that their notes should cover. Unit 7 may be missing those.)
This year I'm teaching Honors Biology at my school in addition to AP Biology. This is a brand new course and I've been given great freedom to design this class as I'd like. The only requirement was that the students are able to take and pass the Living Environment regents exam at the end of the year. My school also wanted me to come up with a name for the class since they didn't just want to call it Honors Bio. I thought about what I'd like students to do and in the end called it Analytical Biology. That proved to be a little intimidating, so we had to convince a few nervous students that it would be a doable class.
Recently in class, we have been working on the concept of water regulation. I wanted students to have practice analyzing how our excretory system handles the water and salt balance beyond just the required osmosis in onion cells required lab. I started a google search to see if there was anything out there appropriate for the class and came across this A&P lab by Cynthia Surmacz. The first part of the lab was beyond the scope of this class, but the end of the document included a dry lab. This dry lab provided students with data from an experiment that required students to analyze to determine which group drank which solutions.
I loved how this lab worked out for several reasons. The first was the graphing practice. Students were given data collected every 30 minutes from time 0 to 90 minutes. They had to graph specific gravity of urine, salt content, and volume. This lead to great discussions of how to decide the scale of a graph. We talked about the technique of determining the range of the data, then starting the y-axis at the lowest rounded value, putting the highest rounded value at the top of the graph and dividing the spaces in between evenly. This also lead to discussions of the goal of having your data fill at least 75% of the graph as opposed to squishing all of the data points in one-fourth of the graph.
I also loved hearing the students debating which group drank which solution. They had to make a table of which group drank which solution and support the decision with evidence. I think the students did fabulous thinking and it made the job that our kidneys do a little more real to the kids.
I separated out the dry lab part of the document and added instructions for my students, so they knew what I expected to be on their posters. Here is the link to that document.
Two years ago, I was planning to do a lab with the heart rate of Daphnia. I had the lab form all prepped for my students, but then realized that I didn't have enough time to order the Daphnia. I went to Google for some ideas and found some great experiments with goldfish (AKA feeder fish). Those I could go to Petsmart for and they only cost $0.14-$0.29. One of the labs I found was the Fish Temperature Lab from Biology Corner, and others from Laying the Foundation, Inc., and a lab by David L. Umbarger in Montezuma-Cortez High School, Cortez, CO, So, for the last two years, we've been doing a lab with goldfish (feeder fish) in both regular Biology and AP Biology that is a combination of these labs. We only have a few modifications in the lab between the two levels of classes. In this one lab, we tie in the concept of endo/exothermy, the respiratory system, and the circulatory system. Last year, we also tried a tie in with the endocrine system, although it was difficult to notice results.
We start the lab by putting a fish in a beaker and then putting the beaker in a water bath. We measure the respiration rate either by counting the opening of the fishes' mouth or the movement of the operculum. Students add warmer water to the bath and continue to measure respiration rate. After we finish with the slightly warmer temperatures, we add ice cubes to the water bath and continue to measure "breaths" as the temperature decreases.
For my regular Biology class, this provides great graphing practice as they gather and find the class average and graph the results. In AP Bio we use this as an opportunity to talk about determining Q10 for fish respirations and talking about what that means.
After giving the fish some time to reaclimate to aquarium temperature, we move onto the next part of the lab. Actually, we usually set those fish aside to allow them to reaclimate and use the fish we didn't use in part one. Each year I've done this lab, I've had to convince students that we won't kill the fish we use in part 2. For part two, we wrap the fish in aquarium water soaked cotton and look at their tails under the microscope. Students are amazed once they see the blood vessels in the fish tails with blood cells actually moving through them.
Last year, in part 2 we then added dilute adrenaline to the fishes' tails to observe the affect, but we had a hard time noticing a difference. We talked about the expected results (faster blood flow) and what the actual results should have been (slower blood flow since the tail is an extremity).
I am happy to report that both years we've done this, all of the fish have survived.
This week both of my classes (high school level Biology and AP Biology) did a termite lab. I love both of these labs. In general, I'm not a big fan of bugs. Dissecting grasshoppers grosses me out. But termites--I just tell myself they're little white ants. Fortunately, you are supposed to avoid touching the termites, so we use paintbrushes to move them around. No complaints here about that! They're pretty low maintenance too. I order a 25 pack of worker termites from Carolina. Both years I've ordered them, Carolina has been generous with the termites, and we've had at least 40 in the package.
In HS level Biology our termite lab is part of our evolution unit. This lab emphasizes the adaptations of the termites and how that helps them to live to reproduce--increasing their fitness for their environment. But to me, the real emphasis of this lab (and AP Bio's) is experimental design. For my middle school/high schoolers this lab provides a whole lab period of design/evaluate/redesign.
Each lab group starts with a petri dish with a piece of paper that I've instructed them to draw a closed shape on with a Paper-mate red pen. I give them three termites and have them observe for a few minutes. Then they must decide on a hypothesis about why the termites behave the way they do and test it. Before they test the hypothesis, they write out the independent and independent variables and the controls they will use so they are only testing one variable at a time. Then students carry out the experiment and observe. After observing for a few minutes, more questions arise and a new or updated hypothesis is formed. The process repeats. Our goal is at least 4 hypotheses tested.
Each time they go through the process, they start to see how their design can be improved. We can talk about how scientists in real life are continually working to improve the design of their experiments and fine tune their hypotheses. The process gets them thinking in a different way than cook book experiments do. For many labs, this process just takes too long, but this one goes fast enough and is simple enough to refine several times in one period.
In AP Biology, this is our animal behavior lab. In this lab, we also discuss taxis and kinesis. We start the same way as the other lab, with the petri dishes, but then they have to develop a hypothesis to test using the choice chambers. They also have to perform a chi-square analysis for each set of results to determine if random chance brought the termites to the chambers that they went to, or if some other factor was in play. We had some great discussion about experimental design with one group who was testing different colors of pen. After their first trial, they realized that maybe the shapes were too far away from each other for the termites to even realized there was another side. Their second round included drawing the shapes closer together. They improved on their experimental design.
The source of the idea for this lab came from the book, Biology Inquiries: Standards-Based Labs, Assessments, and Discussion Lessons by Martin Shields. I developed a sheet that I give my HS Biology kids and then I also outlined requirements for a lab report for my AP Bio kids. I'll include both below.
In addition to teaching AP Biology in a traditional school, I also teach a Biology class at a homeschool consortium once a week. I only have these students for 90 minutes a week. I use that time to complete a lab--choosing them carefully to help support the content of the course that they are learning primarily at home.
We use a textbook and have weekly reading assignments with notes for them to complete. I could tell though that students weren't always grasping the material they were reading about. I kept seeing tweets about EDpuzzle and decided to give it a try. I love it!
Before EDpuzzle, I regularly would assign them a video to watch along with their reading assignment, but there was no way for me to know if they actually watched it or if they understood. With EDpuzzle, not only can I assign a video to watch, but I can add questions and comments throughout the video to emphasize important concepts and test their understanding.
Before class even begins, I am able to see who has watched the videos, how many times, and check their answers to the questions to get a picture of how well they are comprehending the material. Each student chose a user name and password and were enrolled in my class. Now I have a dashboard that allows me a quick overview of how the class is progressing.
EDpuzzle even integrates with Google Classroom. That doesn't help me for my consortium class, but if I wanted I could pull my AP Biology class in with one click.
There are 1000s of pre-made video lessons you could use if you don't want to make your own.
Last year when I was looking for a lab activity to help my students understand the basics of Mendelian Genetics I came across the hands-on activity, Heredity Mix and Match on teachengineering.org.
In my Advanced Life Science class last week we made jelly bean babies. In this lab investigation we're working on distinguishing genotypes from phenotypes and how they are interconnected. We also had discussions about being homozygous and heterozygous for a trait, and even squeezed in a few Punnet squares with a review of dominant and recessive genes. All the students enjoy naming their newly created baby and parents-even the ones I would have never guess would get into it.
I reformatted the Heredity Mix and Match from teachengineering.org into a Google Doc with a just a few minor changes.
Yesterday we did another one of my favorite "labs" in biology. The students had just read the mitosis and cell cycle chapter. To review the events of mitosis, we do an activity I found on Amy Balling's blog, Ballin with Balling. She talked about giving her students an engaging activity on the last day before Christmas break. This involved pulling off the tops of double stuffed Oreos and using sprinkles, toothpicks and the cream covered half of the Oreos to model the process of mitosis and cytokinesis.
Her blog post also included a link to the lab sheet she designed to go with the activity. I used her lab sheet, but reformatted it to be only two pages long. Here's the reformatted version.
It has been a big hit with the students both years that I've used it. It's one of the few opportunities that students have to eat their lab.
