Nervous system

When it came time to tackle the nervous system, I decided we needed to be as hands-on as possible, working with models to help students understand what was going on in this complex system.  I chose three activities for us to do.  We did Pom-Pom Potential from http://teach.genetics.utah.edu/, then we did the Nerve Cell Communication activity from the Life Science Learning Center of the University of Rochester. (It's easy to request the link to be able to access their library of activities.) We finished up with a fun reflexes and reactions lab.

Doing the activities in this order brought us from micro to macro, but I think next year I'll reverse it and go macro to micro so students can go from what they can identify with (reflexes and nerve cell endings) to the more abstract of action potentials.

We had some good discussions about the membrane potential graph of a nerve impulse that was in the question sheet I made to go with Pom-Pom Potential. I would have liked to spend more time talking about the "macro" part of the nervous system of the nerve impulses traveling through the body and the benefits of reflex arcs. Hopefully each year I will tweak this to be better than the year before.

PS-One of my students was "babysitting" for a Junior health student during this activity--thus the doll in the corner of the pom-pom picture.

Book-ending Christmas break with Lorenzo's Oil

Keeping students engaged on the last day before Christmas break can be a challenge, but I don't believe in wasting time.  We just finished our unit on Mendelian Genetics, and watching Lorenzo's Oil is a great complement to what we've done in AP Biology so far.  Last year I found a study unit on the movie here. We started with the activity demonstrating what happens to nerve signals as they become demyelinated. Students start with a "brain bucket full of signals (ping pong balls) and must pass them from one student to the next until it reaches the "body" bucket. We count how many signals (ping pong balls) make it into the body bucket in 10 seconds and then start again. But the second time
we do it, two students have to sit out and the remaining students may not move any closer to each other. We repeat one more time with two more students sitting out, to get a feel for how signal transmissions changes as more of the myelin is lost from nerve cells.

Then we get out the snacks and start watching the movie.  There are questions provided in the study unit to help them keep focused and delve deeper into the science of the movie.

When we get back from break we do the competitive inhibition activity with paper clips and finish the movie.  In the competitive inhibition activity we look at how providing more unsaturated fatty acids "competes" with the saturated fatty acids to hinder the production of very long chain saturated fatty acids (VLCSFA).

As we finish the movie, it leads naturally into a discussion of medical ethics, and is a great segue into our molecular genetics unit.