Lesson 1 - Monday, Jan 22 (40 minutes)
Focus Question: —
What We Did…
Students received their graded Unit 7.1 final essays today with an Academic grade and a detailed grading rubric. They also received a Veracross grade report showing their final Fall Semester Acacemic grade and a way of estimating their final Effort grade.
What We Figured Out…
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How We Represented It…
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Homework: Text
Lesson 2 - Tuesday, Jan 23
Focus Question: What is passed on from parents to offspring and how does this happen?
What We Did…
Returning to our unit today, we shifted from cattle pedigrees to human pedigrees. We discovered that the line drawn between a male and a female in a pedigree doesn’t actually represent marriage for scientists, but instead an act of (sexual) reproduction. After brainstorming the names of the structures of both the male and female reproductive parts, students then tried to write short functions for the parts (if they knew them). It turns out that lots of students don’t know the structures/functions of all of the male and female reproductive parts, so we then set out the following tasks for our next lessons…
1. Learn the names of the structures–and their functions–of the major parts of the MALE reproductive system.
2. Learn the names of the structures–and their functions–of the major parts of the FEMALE reproductive system.
3. Learn about the process of sexual reproduction, aka. conception, aka. fertilization.
4. Learn about the stages of growth and development of a human fetus during pregnancy.
5. Learn about the stages of growth and development of a human being during puberty.
What We Figured Out…
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How We Represented It…
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Homework: —
Lesson 3 - Wednesday, Jan 24
Focus Question: What is passed on from parents to offspring and how does this happen?
What We Did…
We made a new entry in our science notebooks, the Human Reproduction Model. Visually, this model looks similar to the cattle pedigree charts we used last week. Our model showed a male and female producing two living children, one boy and one girl, but also a third child (a girl) who was never successfully born for reasons we will investigate. On this model we then labelled a number of the connecting and departing lines with terms such as Sexual reproduction, Fertilization, Gestation, Birth, Growth & Development, and Puberty. In the coming lessons, we will add information to this model–in both written and pictorial forms–to help us create a final answer to our Driving Question (see blue box below).
What We Figured Out…
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How We Represented It…
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Homework: —
Lesson 4 - Friday, Jan 26
Focus Question: What is passed on from parents to offspring and how does this happen?
What We Did…
Using the visual Human Reproduction Model we developed in Lesson 3, we began two mini-research projects to investigation two important parts of the model: human sperm and egg cells. Using the textbook collection provided by Dr. M in class, we set out to learn everything we could from our class resources about sperm and egg cells. Our guiding questions for these mini-research projects included the following…
- Where in the human body are sperm and egg cells made?
- When are sperm and egg cells made?
- Where in the human body are sperm and egg cells stored?
- What different structures comprise a sperm and egg cells and what are the functions of these different structures?
- What is the size and shape of a typical human sperm and egg cell?
- What are the typical pathways of human sperm and egg cells from their source (where they’re made) out of the human body?
What We Figured Out…
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How We Represented It…
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Homework: —
Announcements...
The DRIVING QUESTION of our current unit is: Why are the human beings different from one another?
#1 - Monday marks the start of the new (Spring) semester!
#2 - ...