7th Grade Students Learn About Traits
Seventh grade students at Lincoln School are learning life sciences with their teacher, Mrs. KC Bree. Their current unit is on reproduction and growth in organisms. Students begin to learn the differences between inherited traits that come from alleles on genes and the acquired traits which come from the environment. To model this phenomenon, students worked in lab groups to determine what their imaginary organism of a “bloop” would look like based on the alleles provided from two parents. Each strand of parental alleles was composed of a color coded bead. Students used a table of possible alleles to decide if a dominant trait, a recessive trait, or a mixed (codominant or incomplete dominant) result showed on the offspring bloop. In the end, each student group was then able to make an environmental change to a trait and construct an explanation as to what will happen to the bloop’s future offspring following an environmental change.
Photo by Garwood Public Schools
