Saturday, March 22, 2014
Zooming In
This is a Making Thinking Visible strategy that I like to use to start a unit. To start our 7th grade genetics and heredity unit, each student built a DNA molecule. This molecule is the foundation to the unit, as well as other following units in life science: Evolution and the Human Body. Students research the basics of the molecule structure as they build, but then are encouraged to randomly place down the nucleotide pairs as the rungs (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine.) It's the randomness of these rungs is what ultimately account for everyone's DNA to be identical and give us our unique traits. This is the foundation of the unit and can be framed as our essential question, "How is an organism’s variation reflects heredity due to the
nature of genetics?" Students hang their DNA molecule above their desk to show its unique properties as as a visual as we refer to it frequently for the remainder of the year.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Jon,
ReplyDelete"Zooming In" is a fantastic routine, but I've always thought of it as an abstract concept ; zooming in on an idea, etc. BUT, the concrete way that you use it with DNA (a tiny thing made huge) is great fun and helps me think about it in a new way. I realize that I can be more concrete with my upcoming unit of social studies by starting with the whole U.S. and zooming all the way past regions to states to a very specific image that symbolizes an important concept within our whole unit; for example, NW to Washington State to Mount Saint Helens to exemplify geography. I love it! Thanks for helping me think about this differently. AND I love the DNA with small unique differences. Very cool! Val