Year 13's go to Liggins

Last week I bundled up eight of my nine Year 13's and took them off to the Liggins Institute up at Grafton Campus in Auckland. They run a fantastic programme that allows students' the opportunity to learn about a number of topics and gain some hands-on practical science lab experience. 

The topic that we were learning about was the importance of a Healthy Start to Life, and how the environment of a foetus can affect what it looks like, it's birthweight and it's health throughout life.

One thing that I particularly remember is being stumped about why 10 little cloned calves who were all genetically identical actually looked different from one another.. (?!?)  I was sitting at the back of the room thinking.. "maybe birth order has affected how many nutrients they have access too.. maybe they have been kept in different paddocks with different food sources.." I didn't even think about the intrauterine environment, from having different surrogate mothers!

It turns out that the environment we all experience inside of our mothers' uterus may have a big influence on the rest of our life, especially during middle-age! 

After morning tea the students got to have a go using a micropipette and setting up a DNA sample for PCR. They mixed and mingled into groups with other students from Edgewater College and Onewhero Area School and worked really well together.

Chandar Dewan demonstrating how to use a micropipette

Sela and Kellie with girls from the other two schools

John concentrating on delivering the right amount of polymerase to the PCR tube

Siale and Rapture looking like they're enjoying the day :)

After students had set up their tubes to be taken away and have the sample copied billions and billions of times, the next thing to do was run gel electrophoresis on different samples of DNA, to work out how long the chain of base pairs were in each sample. If a sample has more base pairs then it is longer and bigger, and will push more slowly through the gel. If the sample has less then it will move more quickly and therefore get further through the gel! Then students could use a pre-set ladder sample to work out how long each one was, using a computer programme. 

Norman all ready to run gel electrophoresis

At the end of the day everybody split into two groups to talk to two scientists. One was still a student working on his masters about nutrition, and students enjoyed asking him what sort of protein is found in Up and Go (soy) and what protein is better to take when working out (whey right before, and casein the night before). 

Mokani and John ready to ask a neuroscientist some questions

The other scientist was a neuroscientist working on Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease, and he brought a real brain with him for students to have a look at, touch and feel! It was covered in a resin to keep it from degrading, so the brain was quite hard and a little bit plastic-y feeling, but so interesting!

Sela, Kellie and Siale touching the brain of a 60-year old!

Siale and Kellie touching a REAL BRAIN!!!

Year 13 Biology made me so proud on the field trip. They displayed respect towards Chandar, the students from other school and each other, and everyone had integrity and responsibility while they participated with their groups during the activities of the day. 

To celebrate their success Mr Kettle and I treated them to some ice-creams and McDonalds fries on the way home. Keep up the great work team! :)

+Rapture Iosefa +Sela Tukuafu +Sialemoka Kuki-Lagatule +Jay Akau'ola-Laula +Mokani Glassie +Norman Fogavai +Keletiola Mapa +Kitana Tutu-Inamata

Year 12 Makes Vocab Keychains

Vocabulary is such a big part of biology, it's almost like having to learn another language sometimes! 

Often in exam answers certain key-words have to be included, or students will have to understand a key word in a question to be able to answer! 

Our Tamaki College Specialist Classroom Teacher suggested taking a tactile approach to learning vocabulary, so I decided to get Year 12 biology to make their own vocabulary keychains.

First, students picked which vocabulary they would like to include on their keychain from these sheets:

Enzyme properties

Enzyme functions

Photosynthesis organelle structure - chloroplasts
Photosynthesis
Factors limiting photosynthesis
DNA replication

Then they cut them out, folded them, and whipped off down to the office to laminate them with Helen.

 When they came back students hole punched and attached each keyword and it's definition to a keychain.

Then we had 10 minutes SSR becoming familiar with their keychain, flipping back and forward between words and definitons.

Students can take them away and look at them over the weekend, or attach them to their keys and keep them until the real exams at the end of the year!

These are a more tactile version of the online vocab sets found in our 12BIO quizlet class :)

Year 12 Makes DNA

Year 12 Bio have been working like absolutely superstars towards their upcoming practice NCEA exam. We have finally covered all of the content (there was a LOT!) and now they are ready to revise and refresh.

On Monday and Tuesday we made lolly models of DNA, and then used them again to demonstrate DNA replication. It seemed to work quite well, and I hope the class enjoyed getting in there and making the models for themselves. 

We used liquorice as the 'sugar' part of the backbone, and added marshmallows as the 'phosphate' - that was the best that we could do for the backbone of the double helix! 

Then we added wine gums as the four bases, making sure to only pick 4 colours of wine gums and only pair them with their 'complimentary base pair.' 

Here's an example of the finished product. :) 

My next post will be some top tips for how to study and revise for exams, both online and off! 

Girls Rugby against Avondale

On Monday I drove the Tamaki College girls first XV to Avondale College, to play a hard-hitting, hard-fought game in the most atrocious weather I have stood in for a long time!

My feet were wet, my toes were numb, the rain was horizontal... I can't imagine how the girls were feeling running around on the field! 

They played with a lot of spirit and I loved their half-time cheer of "SISTERS!"but unfortunately this day the girls were not able to come away with the victory. 

I think my personal highlight of the match was seeing Ripeka chase down an Avondale player as she broke through the girls' line... the girl was sprinting towards the line, aiming to score under the post and Ripeka was thundering after her, catching up... it looked like there was no way to save the try, but Ripeka grabbed her shoulders and tackled her to the ground, twisting her in the tackle to hold the ball up and save the try! What a tackle! 

Earthquake Engineers

By the last day of Term 1 9KMn was ready to put what they had learned about earthquakes, P-waves and S-waves to the test! 

First I shared this presentation with students, who quickly flew through the vocabulary to get to the exciting practical! 

Once students could show me their finished vocabulary I gave them each 30 marshmallows (15 large and 15 small), and 24 sticks (8 long skewers, 8 medium skewers and 8 toothpicks). 

(Next time we do this activity I would give 30 large marshmallows, as the smaller ones proved little use).

The brief was to design a two-story building that would survive through the primary wave of an Earthquake without toppling over or crumbling. 

Jayden and Chase design a pyramid shaped structure. 

We would test their structure in a tray of jelly that simulates P-waves. Students would observe what happened with their design, record their observations, then make improvements to their structure. 

Autymn and Paris designed a cube-and-pyramid 2-level structure and got ready to test it...

The structure proved to be a bit wobbly - back to the drawing board! Perhaps more cross-beams needed? Failure is the best way to learn :) 

The overwhelming success for the day came from a group of boys - PJ, Antonio, Auri and Tionee. Check out the video below to see their design!

Click here to see an example of Autymn's finished engineer work, although noone in class had time to design a poster to sell their idea to an engineering company (on the last slide).

By the end of the lesson I wanted students to have learned that structures are more stable lower to the ground, if they taper or have less mass at the top, and if they have additional support from things like cross-beams.

To revise these principles we finished the lesson off with a class favourite - a Kahoot quiz! Click here to be taken to the quiz I made to summarize this lesson.

The idea for this lesson came from this webpage

Hotspot Animations

Today in our double period 9KMn made play-doh animations of Auckland's volcanic hotspot.

Auckland sits above a hotspot of magma, about 100km under our feet. 

A hotspot is an extremely hot area bordering the crust and the mantle, where temperatures are so high they melt the surrounding rock. There is a plume of hot rock rising out of the mantle as part of the mantles' constantly moving convection currents. It melts the rock and rises through the crust. It forces its way up to the surface and erupts to form a new volcano in Auckland.

How we made animations

Students used play-doh to create the crust, the hotspot, show rock melting, and showing the magma moving up through the crust to erupt at the surface. 

They set up the initial scence and took a photo using their Chromebooks. 

Then students moved the playdoh slightly, acting out what happens in the hotspot under Auckland. After each tiny movement another photo was taken.

One student got the job of adding each individual photo (one group took 51 photos!) to it's own Google Presentation slide. When the presentation is shared to the internet and plays automatically, it looks like a stop-motion animation! 

The final step was to add a few slides at the end of the animation for each student in the group to explain what their animation showed. The student who had added the photos to the presentation shared it to the other students in the group with full editing rights, and students were able to add their paragraph all at the same time (using their own words of course)

Students share their creations

Autymn, Nathan, Paris and Dante made an animation and Auymn posted about it on her blog here.

Please go and leave Autymn's group a comment about what you liked, learned or even what they could improve on next time we make stop-motion animations! 

9KMn Blogs about Alfred Wegener and Continental Drift!

9KMn's blogs are finally up and running, and their first post is about continental drift!

We started the Third Rock From The Sun topic by learning about the layers of the Earth, how the crust is divided up into plates, and how convection currents in the mantle cause sea floor spreading which leads to continental drift.

Students absolutely loved watching the video below at the start of the unit. They convinced me to play it about four times in one lesson!

 After a few days 9KMn was able to understand who all the characters were and what they were talking about when rapping "cut em' out the book notice their shape, they're fitting pretty well there I dare say" and "hey it's Harry Hess and it's after the war, I'm using sonar to map the sea floor."

After a few activities in class such as the classic jigsaw and evidence cut-out for Pangaea, as well as looking at whether certain things count as scientific evidence or not, and looking at Pangaea break-up simulations here and here, students were ready to create and share their new understanding.

They chose what style of creation they would prefer to do. These included a piktochart newspaper article, filming an interview, different styles of writing, creating and performing a rap, or using GOanimate, or Prezi! These links will take you to the criteria students were working off while making their creations.

Some students have finished their creation and included them in their first blog post, while others are still editing and will add them soon! 

Click on their names to see completed blog posts from superstars Talita, Antonio, Anamanu,  Phoenix, and PJ.