Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Another good interactive cell model, similar to the Teach.Genetics‘ Flash app I posted about earlier, can be found at CELLS alive. I first used the CELLS alive website two years ago and I like it because, while it has a much simpler picture than Teach.Genetics’, it has a nicely linked glossary of terms. The glossary is, however, a little technical, but it’s a nice exercise (and not terribly difficult) for students to decipher the basic information that they need.
Teach.Genetics has a bunch of “Print and Go” pdf lessons on their site, but also have a really neat interactive page where you can look inside an animal cell. What’s really neat about this flash app is that you can move around a little, round window as you scan through the cell membrane. You can also take the membrane away to see everything inside the cell at once, but that takes away the challenge.
When you use the little window you have to piece together what everything inside the cell looks like by memory. For a student new to the parts of a cell this might be a bit of cognitive overload, but once your somewhat familiar with the pieces, this makes for an interesting challenge.
The Teach.Genetics site and materials are free for educational use.
Dealing with genetic traits and family trees can be kind of tricky sometimes, particularly with early adolescents who are still learning about personal boundaries and have the potential for sharing too much information. One alternative to delving too deeply into personal family histories is to stress the less invasive traits. Anna Clark has had some success (and the students liked it) using the Handy Family Tree, from the University of Utah’s Teach.Genetics website.
I also discuss some of the thornier issues when we do the John Wyndham book, The Chrysalids. It can be an uncomfortable book, but has the emotional separation of fiction.
Teach.Genetics is a great resource. They have a number of “Teach and Go” exercises like this one, and some interesting interactive applications. I’ll post more as I browse more through their website.
ENSI has a set of great labs that can be used all the way from the middle school to the university level. They deal with the nature of science, the origin of life, evolution and genetics/DNA. (Thanks again Anna Clarke for the link.)
I’m thinking that the Creating Coacervates lab, the only one on the origin of life section, might fit into my orientation cycle plans. Coacervates are small, microscopic blobs of fat (lipids) that look like, and have many of the same properties as cells, amoebas in particular. They can be produced with simple chemicals. One of the key things I’d like to start the year with, is the idea that:
complex life-like cell-like structures can be produced naturally from simple materials with simple changes. Flammer, 1999.
These abiotic blobs can be compared to the protozoans in a water droplet sample while we learn how to use the microscopes. It also ties into the Miller–Urey experiments that produced amino acids using electricity and simple compounds: water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen gas. The Miller-Urey experiments will pop up later when we read Frankenstein.
We went fishing yesterday and one of us caught our first fish. I tend to dislike dissection for dissection’s sake, at least with middle schoolers, but I believe that cleaning fish is a practical life exercise everyone should have that accomplishes the same thing. There is also an ethical dimension for anyone who eats meat. I have no opposition to cleaning anything else if we’re willing to eat it.
So we’ll probably be cooking fish this year. There aren’t many places to purchase whole fish in Memphis so we’ll probably end up doing it during our immersions. An article on the ethics of vegetarianism might also make a good basis for a Socratic dialogue.
Life has four needs, six characteristics and sixteen patterns, but things only get really interesting with viruses that straddle the line between life and non-life. You can run into similar problems when you ask the question of what makes us human.
Both these questions come up in stories like Pinocchio, and any number of robot books, such as John Sladek’s Roderick. Probably because good books go a lot farther in describing characters rather than appearances, you often start with the question, are they sentient and then backtrack to the question of if they’re alive or not.
Interestingly, many of my students equate the question, are they sentient, with the query, are they human? (A fascinating result given the propensity of humanity to divide into groups based on looks.) Which gives rise to the interesting conundrum, can something/someone be “human” and still not alive? We’ve had some fascinating discussions around that question too.
A great place to encounter these issues is in Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein, which also nicely ties-in with the science curriculum since you will probably find it useful to draw out the Frankenstein family tree to keep track of the story. In addition, the historical setting of the book relates to social world issues as the book describes life in the early 19th century, and you realize that the issue of our relationship with technology and science was coming up 200 years ago.
A lighter variant on Frankenstein is Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay. It’s a story about golums who are powered only by the words in their head. Unlike Asimov’s three rules of robotics the words are not literal instructions like the programmer’s code, they can be much more metaphorical, like a receipt. Yet, in the end, many of the same questions about life and humanity arise.
The Tree of Life web project is a growing online collaborative project to:
to contain a page with pictures, text, and other information for every species and for each group of organisms, living or extinct.
It’s a great starting point for looking at the tree of life because each page has links to a wealth of online resources. One of the links on the Mammalia page, for example, is to Faunmap, an online database that produces maps of where different modern and extinct mammalian species can be found in the United States.
All the pages on the Tree of Life website are linked by the branches of the tree of life. The Class Mammalia links up to its parent Therapsida and down to the its Orders such as Monotremata (one of my favorites) and Eutheria, the placenta mammals.
The site is authored by professional scientists and science educators so has that credibility. Most of the images also allow free, non-commercial use. Thanks to Anna C. for the link.
Since we’re focusing on the life sciences this year I want to complete the nature trail. Part of this project is to catalog the biodiversity on the trail. I’d like to have students specialize on the different types of organisms we find. Undoubtedly, the Class Insecta will be well represented. The site, Entomology for Beginners is a great basic resource. It starts with very simple cartoons of insect parts but also has a great key to insect orders which walks you through the comparisons you need to make to identify the Orders in which a particular insect belongs.
The site also has a page on simulating the dynamics of insect populations using a simple model. This may be for the more advanced student however.
A more general guide to bugs (Phylum Arthropoda) can be found at Bug Guide. Their Clickable Guide to the left of the page is a great starting place.
Luc Viatour has a large gallery of macro images of members of the Phylum Arthropoda.