I love this course, and I have taught it three times now at the Canadian College Italy.  It is laid out by the Ontario curriculum and units include:

 

• Biochemistry,

• Metabolic Processes,

• Molecular Genetics,

• Homeostasis, and

• Population Dynamics.

 

I love this course!  It is a huge step up from Grade 11 Biology and I love challenging students with high-level content.  I move away from projects in this course and more towards experiential learning as a group - we do kitchen labs, role plays, games, student-directed lessons, and watch some excellent supplementary documentaries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teams Tournament: This course is very heavy on abstract content, so I try to have students work together regularly to dig into the material and explain it to each other.  For the unit on metabolism, I divide the class into study groups based on their level and have them review together whenever we have spare time in class.  Before the test, we have a tournament where each student competes in a pool of competitors - one from each of the other study groups.  I have set it up in a way where students regulate themselves so I can simply circulate and monitor.  Their placement in the tournament earns them points that they bring back to their original study group, and the group with the highest score wins!  This has been one of my most effective strategies ever with students loving the competition and learning through teaching each other. 

 

Fermentation Kitchen Lab: I developed this lab activty when I was finding myself in need of something to break up a complex unit. Fermentation is easily connected to the food industry (beer, cheese, wine, bread, etc.) so we move into the school kitchen and make some bread!  By getting their hands dirty, it's easier for students to remember what ingredient is the source of glucose, for example, and that the bread is rising because the alcoholic fermentation taking place is producing carbon dioxide gas.  Plus, any day they get to eat in class is a good day!

 

Taboo: This is one of my students' favourite activities and I've used it in several other courses as well as this one. I read many years ago that the game of Taboo was originally developed as a biology review game and I was eager to try it in my own classroom.  It makes so much sense - if you can explain a term without using the most obvious words, you really know what you're talking about. I have created a set of blank cards with only the vocabulary terms on top and pass a few out to each student.  They choose five words to be the taboo words that cannot be used in the explanation.  Once we have a class set of cards prepared, we have a round robin tournament.  It's always lively and fun and students regularly use the cards in their test preparation.  

 

Origami DNA: This is basically a 3D version of a diagram that gets students using their hands in a different way.  To make the foldable, students need to understand how the nitrogenous bases pair up and by which types of bonds.  It is all colour coded and creates a cute product that I hang from the ceiling to decorate the room that students can't avoid.

 

Photosynthesis Role Play: Looking at photosynthesis at the molecular level is very complicated.  To make it more accessible to students and to create an anchor for them, I adapted an activity I found online to create a role play for the light-dependent reactions. Students are each assigned a role (ex: ATP Synthase, Z protein, etc.) and receive a nametag and associated props. They work through the situation together to move around electons and create ATP. I make a point to have students associate each step with the classmate who played the role in order to make it stick in their brains better.

 

Population Dynamics Children's Book: This is a commonly seen deliverable that I like to assign in the final unit - it is fun and taps into their childish side. Each pair must select a relationship between organisms (commensalism, mutualism, predation, parasitism) and create a story book that explains the topic. They have the option to create it by hand or using a compter program of their choice.