Adaptation and Inheritance for KS3 Activate Science (Bundle)

Adaptation and inheritance for KS3 Activate – Bundle
This is a product of 4 years of sharing ideas, students’ feedback and teaching this topic to KS3 students - with a selection of my most successful tasks. The total of 134 slides contains a set of tasks – plenty to choose from, suited for different levels of ability.
Lesson contents:
Topic: Variation
- Starter – Mr Men activity (parents and children)
- A class-survey task on discontinuous characteristics
- Inherited and environmental characteristics (examples)
- Plenary – draw an alien with different characteristics (tip: display student’s work using the visualizer and ask students to describe and explain their work)
- Exit activity – ‘If this is the answer, what is the question?’
Topic: Continuous and discontinuous variation
- The tallest and the shortest man in the world – YouTube video and discussion
- Sorting activity – types of characteristics
- Whole-class activity – the measurement of height (requires a measuring tape) of the students with instructions, results’ table and editable Excel histogram to display the class results
- Homework – the measurements of the hand survey and drawing of a histogram
- Exit activity- ‘If this is the answer, what is the question?’
Topic: Inheritance and chromosomes
- Pre-assessment – mini-quiz from previous lesson
- Starter – baby gorilla vs. human baby – similarities and differences
- Nucleus, gene, chromosomes, DNA – printable worksheet with answers (matching the key-words with their definitions)
- High ability extension task – dominant and recessive characteristics, including a visual animation for the tongue-roller inheritance and the Punnett square
- Super-heroes match-making activity with a class-set of printable cards (two for each student), example and instructions for the task
- Plenary – the Jeremy Kyle Show – the case of a disputed parenthood – an expert’s explanation
Topic: Natural selection
- Pre-assessment – mini-quiz from the previous lesson
- Starter – the evolution of humans in the future (video and discussion)
- Fill-in the gaps activity
- The steps of the natural selection flow-chart
- The evolution of a blob – the whole-class body science activity to visualize the process of natural selection
- Group activity (requires black and white confetti disks, black sheet of paper, a pair of tweezers and a stopwatch), including the instructions, a model table for the results
- An animated gif showing the example of natural selection, with a follow-up questions for the students


Continuation on the attached Word Document.