Wow! Human Evolution

Tamaki Productions presents... Wow! Human Evolution

ft. the best Year 13 Biology class ever.

Miraculously filmed on a state-of-the-art Upper Paleolithic iRock.

Performed by archaic bipedal Homo sapiens from 12,000-10,000 years ago:

Danielle (aka Dani, aka Mitochondrial Eve), 

Priscilla, 

Jeff (aka Tarzan aka Mitochondrial Adam), 

Jennyfer, 

Elisha,

Atelaite, 

Latanoa,

Lisia

Gloria (aka Grandma) and

(there in spirit while off representing Auckland in rugby) Maia.

Reflections - Class Time

Each year I try to make at least one lesson a week per class a little special in some way. Sometimes the timeline is so intense that it's not possible, but these were a few of my favourites this year:

I murdered Perry the Pear for the third time. Sorry bud. Your splatter looked GREAT this time around though.

Who Killed Perry? activity by my (quite amazing) friend Rachel Allwood, 2016

I tried something new with Y12 to teach them about genotypes, phenotypes, inheritance and meiosis. We made these little marshmallow critters, called Reebops (totally nicked THIS idea off the internet!) It was great fun.

Reebop activity

Y12 did a practical with eggs to learn how proteins denature. 

I told Sarah to hold still for this pic, because "it looks like an add for Science and Tamaki!" 

I had a wonnnderful student teacher who had a great way about her with the kids. She only revealed her secret singing talent to us on the last day when she hit us with a rendition of Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together," remixed as "We are learning CRISPR" - maybe someone could make a film festival movie out of it next year.

I had lots of help to run Period Zero on a Monday morning at 7.30, to help prepare HSA students for a successful career in the Health Science world. Thanks to the teachers who gave their time!

KPop Sound and Light Literacy Data!

Presenting the Year 9 Sound and Light unit data!

Please peruse at your own leisure. I'm really happy with the shift students made.

Check out the entire unit (adjusted to suit the Eastern culture interests of my 2018 class) here

Science and Mātauranga Māori

This week my new Year 11 class are starting the Physics 1.1 internal, worth 4 credits.

About 50% of my class is Māori, so I thought it was really important to spend some time showing students that:

a) Science can be fascinating and helps to answer all kinds of interesting questions and
b) Science and Mātauranga Māori are linked, and can support one another.

Here is the link to the presentation about some of the scientific studies throughout history I found the most interesting to learn about at university and beyond! They include how far authority can push the average human (to murder?), how the bystander effect impacts when people help one another, whether humans can survive on Mars (or trapped in a Biosphere for 2 years!) and the current investigation into what my class named "poo pills" can help overweight people have increased gut flora diversity and health, and whether that will help them to lose weight.

And here is the link to this presentation about some recent Māori research that follow the basic scientific method of: ask a question that interests you, work out the best way to find the answer, and then go and research it! It also touches on what Mātauranga Māori is and how indigenous knowledge and collaborative learning is vital to both learning and research.

Hangi In Science

We've had Mike Stone come to visit and provide professional development for us around Culturally Responsive Pedagogy recently. Last week she put up a slide that said "Beyond the Hangi unit." 

I thought, "uh-oh." I planned a hangi lesson with 9TGn two weeks ago. It had taken a bit of planning, and then I went and got sick on the day of the hangi and had to leave it to relievers to run! 

Quite special relievers, I will note: 9TGn were treated to a science lesson with their Principal Mrs Pamaka and Deputy Principal Mr Dunn, along with our lovely Nanny Barb and Tamaki's kaumātua Wally who were always going to lead different parts of the hangi as experts!

Wally thought it wouldn't be worth doing a small hangi and he's used to making them for over 50 people, so we sold meal tickets for $10 to teachers and prepared to make 60. The money collected covered the costs for the student's food and the hangi materials. The extra we made went back to Nanny Barb and the Whare Kai, because she feeds students in there all the time!

Nanny Barb knew what to do in the Whare Kai, and it looked like everyone enjoyed preparing the food and having a natter!

Here are some of the 9TGn boys heating stones for the pit.

This is Roimata's Presentation from the science lesson after, where I asked them to recount: 

Here are the instructions for their blog posts, which included a requirement to include all three of the sentences we've learnt about recently. I've been trying to consciously teach writing skills this term, and I think it's been going fairly well? The Presentation below is one I created for a double lesson, where students creatively wrote on paper for 5 minutes and then "cast" their later sentences anonymously onto a Padlet we could all see.

Here are some of the blog posts writen by students:

Roimata

Sene

Havea

Journey

Michael

Teremoana

When I saw Mike's slide I was worried that she would say the hangi lesson was not culturally responsive, or that linking energy or heat conduction/convection etc to hangi is done too often and is too cliche or token.

However, (luckily) she thought providing students the time and opportunity to participate completely in the cultural experience of preparing a hangi (something I am STILL yet to do - stupid sickness) with kaumātua to guide them - and without trying to do science at the SAME time - was really valuable to the kids.

I could still relate the hangi back to science/energy/heat later on, but the actual skills and knowledge of how to cook hangi was something entirely separate.

I hope the students have taken learning away :)

Year 9 KPop and Literacy in Science

My Year 9 class has been learning about energy, sound, light and sight in the context of KPop this term because of their fascination with it (and Japan, and anime)..

This activity took three days but I believe it was completely worth it!

First, we spent an entire period playing with these energy cards. 

Students raced against other to complete a full set, and then I gave them a few minutes to look at their completed sets as "answers." Then the real fun began. Desks were set in a circle, and students battled each other in a game of memory by setting the cards in a grid and taking turns flipping over three. 

Two rules must be enforced for this: 

1. Cards must be flipped over in the spot that they lived, and stay in that spot when they're flipped back over.

2. Both students must see all flipped cards, not just their own. 

The next day we had a double period. 

I moved around the room and let students randomly draw out pictures from this set, which was created based on what I knew about their interests (rugby, netball, Fortnight, Ru Paul's Drag Race, Dragon Ball - and some weird and wonderful photos to get creative juices flowing).

Then they had to identify two different types of energy in the picture, before swapping and having another go. Finally, in their small groups I gave them 1 picture between them and they set about writing a paragraph onto a big whiteboard between them. If they got stuck they could use this template. 

For the rest of the lesson (once they had a complete paragraph with full stops and capital letters in the right places) they individually split their paragraph as "Evil Wizards." Many students found this difficult and I had to spend time with lots of students 1-on-1 to teach them. This activity only works if each sentence is split in HALF (not more than that). Having different energy scenarios (from the different images) ensured that each paragraph was different - necessary for the next activity.

As an added bonus I included the word "wizard" in korean at the top and a link to it being pronounced out loud, because this class (largely) are quite interested in Eastern cultures, hence the KPop context for this term as well.

This activity engaged some students who had previously not been engaged. Student 2 LOVED it. 

Another student who hasn't been overly keen on writing this year also really engaged with this, she experienced lots of pride in completing her paragraph split before others in the group and led the charge as a "Good Wizard" in our final lesson.  Here is the link to her finished work. 

The final lesson was perhaps the most simple, but the most effective. 

I had copied and pasted 6 finished "Evil Wizard" split paragraphs from the 6 groups in class into a document and printed one copy. Then, I cut them out and sellotaped them around the room. 

"Could this have been done digitally?" asked one of our DP's who had wandering into my room during the lesson. It probably could have, but that day I wanted students to get up out of their seats and move around the room rather than be in their usual static position. I could perhaps have included the paragraphs as a QR code to be scanned, but they were honestly just as excited to see their own paragraphs on the walls.

Students recognised their own paragraphs and most "healed" them first.  This also gave them ownership of their learning - they had created the activity themselves!  They were eager to move around the room and solve the rest. 

Here is the link to a blank "Good Wizard" activity - you'll have to complete the lesson sequence to have 6 split paragraphs to solve!

Year 11 Microbes Internal

Today I had my Y11 for an internal intensive (rather than a mid-year exam). We've been learning about bacteria and fungi for two weeks now using a mixture of Education Perfect, literacy activities designed by our literacy specialist Marc Milford and class activities. 

Today was a bread and yoghurt-making practical that they will have to discuss for their 4-credit write-up next week. 

Hopoate and Hala sieving their flour as they begin to make bread.

Each group started off the lesson by making a slightly different type of bread using a variation of a basic recipe. After all the steps were followed and the dough was left to rise (aka the yeast were left alone with the flour to conduct anaerobic respiration) we baked the bread for 25 minutes.

Then we made observations of the appearance of the bread, and also did a taste-test. 

Chelsea with the different variations of bread (her wholemeal bread is second from the right).

After we had made bread using yeast we interacted with a different microorganism - bacteria! 

Students first heated milk to destroy any pathogenic (harmful) bacteria, and then cooled it to the optimum temperature for our helpful species. Then the bacteria were added and left to do their work for the next five hours. We'll eat the yoghurt tomorrow!

Makaydyn making yoghurt - the live bacteria cultures are in the yellow packet Desiree is holding on the left of the picture, and are about to added now the milk has dropped to the optimum 40 degrees celsius. 

The students were great and the lesson went really well. I would definitely do this with a class again - perhaps earlier in the topic, so when we discuss respiration in greater depth they would have something tangible to hook the abstract concept on.

We couldn't have run this lesson without Ms Heka helping us out in her kitchen! Hopefully we left it as we found it Ms Heka! Thanks for hosting us :) 

Y13's Animate CRISPR Delivery to Cells

Year 13 has been learning about how humans manipulate genetic transfer in other organisms. In other words - how have humans managed to change the genes of species that they have found most useful? These genetic manipulations started thousands of years ago with the selective breeding of farm and domesticated animals such as goats and dogs and has continued to advance.

Now we're at a stage of technological capability that scientists can 'knock out' or 'switch off' a SINGLE gene they're interested in with massive precision, OR even insert or 'knock in' a new / healthy copy of a gene! This is particularly interesting in terms of healthcare - fixing a disease caused by a single gene by replacing the altered copy with a healthy version!

Year 13 first learnt about how CRISPR (a recent gene editing technology) works before they attended a workshop about CRISPR's potential for use in New Zealand's healthcare system.

Gene editing in Healthcare by The Royal Society Te Aparangi

The Y13's before going into the workshop.

Lonise, Clearissa and Sharon.

A few days after the workshop we had a chat about things we had understood, didn't quite understand, and questions we (myself included!) were a bit shy to ask. We fired off a quick email to one of the scientists who were at the workshop, and were pleasantly surprised when he replied! 

Here's the link to his responses to our questions.

The first two questions we had were about how scientists actually deliver CRISPR into cells so that it could manipulate the genome in cells, such as embryos - or whole organisms. 

The scientist explained that DNA that contains the instructions to build CRISPR's Cas9 enzyme and gRNA and possibly a template can be packaged up and delivered into a cell via a virus or nanoliposomes. Embryos can have the DNA for CRISPR injected directly into them along with sperm, before fertilisation. 

Year 13 spent their double period today animating one of the three delivery methods with play-doh. 

The followup activity for this is to have students present their animation verbally to the class, or for me to combine all of these FANTASTIC animations into a short video and then have students practice writing descriptions of what they observe. 
Our school and cluster goal is to improve the literacy of our students. I'm hoping that this activity scaffolds confidence in writing scientific explanations. 

Literacy with 9TGn

9TGn is getting increasingly used to reading together in pairs and small groups, as well as discussing what they've read. I designed a litearcy activity to more deeply explore what an "ecological niche" is, in the context of Weta - New Zealand's Mouse. 

My recent readings have reiterated that it's not good enough to just give a scientific text to a class and expect them to engage with it, learn from it, acquire language or comprehend it in a way that's beneficial. 

I created a guided reading (with only three prompts and three discussion points this time - I've done some with more and they REALLY got into that one) and students got on with the paired reading with very little fuss. 

They helped each other with pronounciation of new words and some began to google the meaning of new words as they went. I thought this was interesting because I had created two versions of the guided reading; both had the same prompts, reading and discussion points but they had different glossary words down the side. They could have used the glossary for many of the words they Google'd but preferred to go to Google!

Also, a few students chose to do the reading online (the link was provided) but most of the others got out a pen and scribbled notes on their papers and used their finger or pen to read along with their peer. 

Version 1 of the guided reading here

Version 2 here

Glossary words weren't limited to scientific vocabulary, it also included 'rancid,' 'distinguished,' 'fascinated' and 'deter.' 

At the end of the guided reading and the discussions had taken place I gave out coloured post-its for students to share what they had talked about. 

Students found the second discussion point the easiest; identifying whether a weta was male or female using evidence from a paragraph. The second-easiest point was the first, about 'what an ecological niche includes' - but that required students to take the specific evidence about a weta niche and generalise it out; an ecological niche doesn't include living in a cave, but it does include where something lives. The most difficult point was the 'summarising a paragraph' one.  Some students struggled to combine information from sentences or identify the 'key point' or the 'gist' of the paragraph.

Unfortunately we ran out of time to do anything with shared post-its :( Perhaps I could have asked each small group to create a poster of the class' responses. 

Video Calling out Classmate in Tonga

One of my Year 13's had to return to Tonga for a week and has been missing out on a lot of very content-rich lessons on quite complex information about gene-editing. 

In class today I turned around to help a different group and found myself face to face with my missing student! One of his classmates had connected to him via video calling and was narrating to him what she was doing in class today. 

Then she passed the phone over to her friend, who showed him what her group was doing. He got passed between a few groups and one of the students gave him a brief summary of the point of the learning. 

How cool is that :) 

Salome showing Paulo what she's achieved with her group (foreground).

Play-doh Chloroplasts With Year 12

Today in Y12 biology our lesson was in two parts; learning about the structure of a chloroplast first, followed by learning the stages of photosynthesis. 

To help with learning how to draw and label a chloroplast we made play-doh models of them, using different colours to represent different structures.

For all of the models (bar one) green is used to represent the thylakoid discs stacked into granum (the plural for these is grana), because the thylakoid discs are where chlorophyll is found. Chlorophyll is the pigment responsible for absorbing red and blue wavelengths of light for energy and reflecting back green wavelengths, which gives plants their green colour.

Pink: outer membrane. Yellow: inner membrane: Red: stroma. Green: thylakoid stacks in grana. White: lamellae.

Yellow: outer membrane. White: inner membrane: Pink: stroma. Green: thylakoid stacks in grana and lamellae joining them.

Pink: outer membrane. Red: inner membrane: White: stroma. Green: thylakoid stacks in grana.

Pink: outer membrane. Green layer: inner membrane: Yellow: stroma. Red: ribosomes. Green: thylakoid stacks in grana.

Yellow: outer membrane.  Absent: inner membrane: Blue: stroma. Green: thylakoid stacks in grana.

Green: outer membrane. Red: inner membrane: Yellow: stroma. Pink: thylakoid stacks in grana.

Mikayla made an adorable miniature model.

Priscilla with her chloroplast.

Yellow: outer membrane. White: inner membrane: Red: stroma. Green: thylakoid stacks in grana.

After the class was comfortable with the structures inside a chloroplast they were ready to move on and learn about how photosynthesis happens in two of these structures; the thylakoids and the stroma. 

Students will have to work hard filing this away in their long term memory in a way that makes sense to them; drawing diagrams of the process, explaining it out loud, teaching others, or writing the story of photosynthesis in their own words. This is one of those concepts where I can be around to answer questions but I can't physically MAKE students learn it, and when it becomes tricky they need the resilience to wrestle on! 

Layers of the Earth Cake

Year 9 has just started their Third Rock From the Sun unit, which begins inside the Earth as students learn about the layers beneath their feet. 

I know that this topic is both popular and successful because the year-group it was first taught to in Year 9 is now in Year 11, and when I surveyed my Year 11's about which topics they remembered best and felt most confident in, "volcanoes" and "layers of Earth" came up again and again. Because of that my Year 11's will be doing the Surface Features of NZ internal assessment later this year, to play to those strengths. 

Anyway, back to the current Year 9's. I thought a good way to welcome them in to science this year and introduce the idea of modelling in science would be with a cake!

If anyone wants the recipe for sponge layers then here it is:

Pre-heat oven to 175 degrees C.

Beat 7 small eggs (or 6 large ones) on high for 1 minute. 

Slowly add in 1 cup of sugar and beat on high for 8 minutes.

Measure and mix 1 cup of flour with 1/4 teaspoon baking powder.

Sieve and fold in the flour mixture to the eggs 1/3 at a time, making sure to get the flour off the bottom of the bowl (where it likes to sink to).

Pour half the mixture into a baking-paper-lined cake tin.

Add some food colouring to the rest of the mixture and then pour that into another cake tin.

Bake for 25 minutes.

Make sure students can name the layers of the Earth before they get to take a piece on the way out the door!

Class Korowai on Mr Bones

Every year I get my students to decorate two feathers for their class korowai - one with images or words that represent who they are, and one with a specific goal for their time in science. 

This year I decided to merge all the feathers from my four classes to make one large korowai rather than four smaller one, and actually have it worn as a cloak by Mr Bones rather than displayed flat on the classroom walls. 

Here is the finished product:

New Tool - EdPuzzle!

Hello! I'm back after my year-long hiatus, refreshed, engaged, calm and ready to roll.

I've just been checking through the first Year 9 unit called "Third Rock From the Sun" and found that one of my favourite tools (Zaption) doesn't exist any more.

A quick Google search later and I've discovered a replacement with even more features and useful tools.

Meet EdPuzzle :) It's a tool to help you to help student engage with information on videos by including questions, notes or voice-overs throughout.

First you import any video from youtube.

You can trim the clip down.

You can set due dates.

You can add questions throughout the video, as well as voice-overs and notes.

You can block and prevent 'skipping' through the video or skipping questions.

When presented with a question, students can submit their answers or choose to 'rewatch' the segment it relates to.

You can share it to your class when you're done, or embed it with an iframe.

You can see how many/which students have engaged with your activity and what they've scored (I am guessing the score only applies to multi-choice questions, though you can read their answers on open-ended ones).

You can see how individual questions were answered. 

And if you are interested in seeing the one that I made as a model, you can click here to engage with it (and maybe learn a few things about the Layers of the Earth as well!)

Respiration Rap

Today our respiration rap from 2015's Year 12 Biology class clocked over 2,000 views on youtube! 

It was also retweeted by Dr Rich Allen, a teacher-trainer whose 2-day course was the most inspiring PD I have ever been to. 

His use of music and movement in teaching and learning is something that really resonated with me, as well as 'riding the wave' of engagement by 'changing state' near the peak of engagement. 

I'm so stoked that he thought what the Bio kids did was a good example of learning through movement and music :) 

Unfortunately this year I haven't had time to record and film another full music video in time for the Manaiakalani Film Festival, despite having 3 songs already written and ready to go about photosynthesis, genetic variation and hotspot volcanoes! 

Time seems short this year :( Hopefully we'll get on to filming one of the songs in Term 4 - the challenge is out to the 2016 Year 12 Biology class!! 

+Caroline Akau'ola-Laula +Jacob Fifita +Maria Mahoni +Kayde Inia 

Instead, I'll just repost the Respiration Rap to enjoy :) 

Filming Year 13 Biology

This year I've been involved in the Manaiakalani Google Class OnAir project with my year 13 biology class - it's taken up most of my free 'blogging' time which is why this blog has been so quiet this year! 

I've just published lesson 12, which is the final lesson in a series of four consecutive lessons. 

I thought it would be interesting to film, publish and reflect on a full week's teaching and learning. 

The aim of this was both for me to reflect on my assumptions as a teacher and my view on the pedagogy of building understanding during one specific context (timing in plants and animals), as well as provide an honest view on how I incorporate technology into my average, daily teaching to anyone who chooses to view my Class OnAir project! 

My latest reflection was on how, overall, I'm quite happy with the progression of learning I laid out about the content of timing, the multimodal and rewindable learning opportunities offered and how many times we returned to information over the week, hopefully building both knowledge and confidence from new vocabulary up to more complex ideas such as the mechanism of photoperiodism.

However, on reflecting on the last lesson I have noticed that I did not follow a similar scaffolding procedure to introduce answering exam questions, and instead expected students (by the end of the week, by the end of Term 3) to be able to straight away apply their new understandings to an exam question. This proved to be quite a jump in skills.

Next Term when we return to revise for the Plant and Animal Responses exam I will work to support students in answering exam questions, and I reflect on how to do this at the end of my Lesson 12 post, which can be found under the green butterfly at this link here. 

Something else I tried for the first time OnAir was to include a full video of my explanation of the concept. I did this so students could return to it and help them study by watching it again at their own pace. You can watch it below:

Pedigree Charts Intro with Y12

Today Year 12 learned about pedigree charts. To start with they each picked a cat and colored in the nose either pink or brown, and gave their cats a name. As they finished I put them up in a pedigree chart, to show the relationships between each of their cats. 

I thought this might be a good way to introduce pedigree charts. We did a 'mini whiteboard quiz' where I asked who the parents of Ziggy were, who the two grandparents of Nala and Mufasa were, etc.

On the side of the board I also drew the squares and circles used in pedigree charts to represent male and females. Then I colored in the symbols depending on whether the cats had a pink or red nose. 

The questions in the whiteboard quiz became harder; which trait is most likely recessive? (Brown, because Churry and King have pink noses but their offspring Jerry has a brown nose. Meanwhile, Lilo and Junior both have brown noses, and only produced brown-nosed Ziggy and Simba). What are the genotypes of Brown and Cat? Etc. 

Once we started to try and work out genotypes based off relationships and offspring/parents, students became a little more confused. We moved on to some activities on my genetics website and I moved around, trying to help. 

I thought I would try to show my thought process while working out genotypes based on phenotypes in pedigree charts:

IF pink noses were recessive, Churry and King would both be homozygous recessive; nn. How, then, could they have produced brown-nosed Jerry, when neither of them has a dominant allele to pass on? They couldn't! 

Therefore, brown noses must be recessive. 

That means Jerry must be nn, because Jerry has a brown nose. 

Where did Jerry get his two recessive nn alleles from? Both of his parents must carry at least one recessive allele. They must be ?n,

What is their other allele?

Jerry's parents Churry and King both have pink noses, the dominant colour. They must have at least one dominant allele, to have pink noses. That means their other allele must be N. 

Therefore both Churry and King are heterozygous; Nn. Both parents are showing the dominant phenotype, but must also carry a recessive allele each to produce children with both pink and brown noses:

To produce both phenotypes, both parents must be heterozygous. If they were both NN, then 100% of their children would also have the dominant trait of pink noses. 

As you can see, Churry and King produced offspring with both pink and brown noses. The offspring with pink noses (Bestfriend Stealer and Tom) could be NN or Nn - we will have to see what their  genotypes are based on their own offspring! 

Hopefully this blog post helped people learn how pedigree charts can reveal genotypes, as well as relationships between individuals. Maybe you can even work out Bestfriend Stealer's genotype, based off her offspring Nala and Mufasa's phenotypes!