Did you know that your fingerprints are actually created when you touch the amniotic sac when you are a fetus? That’s just something we learned during our previous science unit!

The whole unit was surrounded around a driving question, how does DNA and genetics determine the characteristics of living things? Before we started learning about anything we were told to rack our brains of any info we remembered from last years science. Then we had to put all that info into a MindNode, I really couldn’t remember much from last year so my mind map was very empty:

So we started off with learning about DNA and genetics. A few things we learned were things like what DNA looks like (coiled ladder like structure) and what DNA is made of (phosphate, sugars and 4 nitrogenous bases) Now for the genetics portion we learned about things like genetic makeup, and phenotypes (brown eyes) and genotypes (HH, hh, Hh). Throughout this section we also learned some vocabulary like dominant (more likely) and recessive (less likely) homozygous (HH, hh) and heterozygous (Hh)

We learned a lot but now it was time to show our learning, a project! This year we had to make a podcast, this podcast had to answer the question, If two sets of identical twins get married (identical twin boys each marry identical twin girls) and each couple has a child, could the resulting children be identical? On top of that it had to follow some criteria:

While we were working on our project we also learned about cell division, and different types of mutations (neutral, harmful, beneficial) The most interesting thing I learned about was how organisms can change over time by environmental influences. The pepper speckled moth is a great example of this. These moths started off as black because of the air pollution as the industrial revolution began. But as the air became cleaner the moths began to lighten in colour so that they would hide better from bats and other predators. This helped prove Darwin’s theory of natural selection, another thing we learned about.

Back to the podcast, as per usual we stared off with writing a script in pages. Once we we finished we had to start recording in an app called ferrite. I’m actually starting to really like this app, it’s really easy to record and move clips around while editing which is great! A few things we had to think about while we were recording were pace, tone and clarity. Once we were done we created some music in garage band to help intrigue the listeners. Then we smushed everything together in iMovie, done!

Once we showed it to the class we were given some pier critique and from that we improved our podcast. We basically just added some more info on the topic and driving question, and had to change some transition sentences to make the script flow nicer. Here’s the final draft!

Just like what we did at the beginning of the unit (mind map of knowledge) we had to do again, showing briefly what we learned.

Here just a glimpse of my learning!Overall this unit helped clear up some questions I had about DNA. I also learned some new interesting stuff along the way, as well as improving my recording and editing skills!