Onion Mitosis Lab

One of the labs that I've come to enjoy while we are studying the cell cycle in AP Biology is the Onion Mitosis lab. I love this version of the lab because it requires very little prep time on my part, and within a week, my students have some real data to analyze. The lab I use with my students was modified from Lee Ferguson and can be found on her website, The Biology Space, here under the cell structure and function resources. 

It's hard to see, but we usually hold the onions up in the beakers by rubber banding them around a straw that sticks lower than the ends of the onions. That way the root bases aren't pushed against the bottom of the beaker.

I really only modified the materials that I provide the students to experiment with and how the results will be presented--since my students do a mini poster presentation of their results. The modified lab document can be found here.

The Gymnema Taste Lab and the Signal Transduction Pathway

When it comes to understanding cell communication and the signal transduction pathway, the Gymnema Tea Taste lab has become a class favorite. Of course, I first heard about this lab through my favorite source of ideas, the National AP Biology Teachers facebook group. You can find the write up for the lab at the Biology Corner here.

Last year, the lab happened to land on Grandparents' Day at our school. On that day, I not only had my students, but also many of their grandparents. I modified the lab to shorten it to the basics so I could hand the grandparents a one sheet lab that allowed them to also participate. This lab handout is here. The grandparents LOVED it! After the tasting, I handed students chalk markers to sketch out the signal transduction pathway on their tables with their grandparents.

I do think what tea you buy is important. The fist tea I bought did not work, but I've had great success with Buddha teas. I think part of the reason for success is having 100% gymnema sylvestra tea vs. just 48% gymnema.

This worked great for me, consistent results every time.

This did not work for me, even when I concentrated it.

One year, I had an exceptionally adventurous class. After they tried all of the foods I had provided in the lab, they went to their lunchboxes and tried bananas, strawberries and raspberries just to see what it would do with natural (unprocessed sugars). They were pleased to see that it really did work on fruits too. We also counted papillae after dying their tongues blue. As you can see in the picture, they were good sports about everything!

Regents Review with Locked Boxes

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.

Here's the link to all of the files for the breakout:
Diagrams to put around the room
Directional Maze
LE Regents Review Breakout
Teacher Directions

Reviewing for the Biology Exam by Playing Spoons

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.

Here is the document with the review cards.

Structure Strips for Note-taking

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.)

Unit 1: Characteristics of Life
Unit 2: Nutrients, Energy, and Biochemical Processes
Unit 3: Homeostasis in Humans
Unit 4: Diseases and Disruption of Homeostasis
Unit 5: Comparative Reproduction
Unit 6: Genetics, Biotech, and Decision Making
Unit 7: Ecology

Population Growth Curves with Bubbles

This was another mini lab from the collection of labs from Dr. Close that I blogged about here. In this lab students were recreating the 3 different population growth curves by caring or not caring for a population of bubbles.

For the growth curve of k selected species who care for their young to maturity, students blow a bubble and do everything in their power to not let the bubble pop. This included blowing on the bubble and fanning it away from obstacles. This section certainly takes the longest because the bubbles last the longest. I started getting nervous that we wouldn't finish within out 80 minute time frame while students worked on this population, but fortunately, the other two population types go more quickly. Personally, I found this the most hysterical section of the lab, and I think students would agree. (Although none of my pictures quite captured how funny they looked chasing their bubbles around.)

In the next population, students blew a bubble, but could not help it along. This was a hard transition after protecting the first 50 bubbles so carefully.

In the final population, not only could students not help the bubbles, but for them to survive past birth, the bubble had to cross over a meter stick that was one meter in front of the bubble blower. These results mimic the r selected species, often where parents lay many eggs with no parental involvement past that.

After data was collected, students graphed their data on semi-log paper to see how well it matched to the graphs in their textbook.  I reformatted the lab into this document. For the semi log paper, I like the paper from here and choose the 2 decades paper.

This was a great lab to get students outside and moving around a lot. The lab also gave them a real experience to relate back to the graph they needed to understand.

Modeling Energy Movement Between Trophic Levels

One of my main goals when teaching is to help students understand concepts by them actually interacting with the concept in a hands-on way. I was reading through posts on one of the science teacher Facebook groups that I'm a part of and saw a post about a lab demonstrating energy loss from one trophic level to the next. The lab was part of a set of labs from the Health and Science Pipeline Initiative. Although you need to register to be able to use the curriculum on the website, it is free (my favorite kind). The Medical Biology labs are organized by NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas for Life Science. Under LS2: Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics is lab 12 Cycling of Matter and Energy Flow. We just did part "a" of the lab. All parts of the lab look great, but we were short on time. We were able to complete part a in a 40 minute period.

I printed out labels for the cups, representing 5 trophic levels: producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, and quaternary consumers. All cups but the producers have holes in the bottom. We used sidewalk chalk in the parking lot to mark off 10ish foot sections and brought out a couple of water pitchers (representing the energy moving from one trophic level to the next). The lab calls for 500 mL of water per cup, but our cups weren't that big, so we started with 200 mL which worked fine. Next time, we may separate the energy levels by more than 10 feet, since students were getting pretty good at quickly getting from one level to the next without losing much water.

Students had a great time running the leaking cups from one energy level to the next and they had a solid understanding of energy movement and consumption from one tropic level to the next. This one is a keeper.