Natural Selection Project

We don't have very much time for our evolution unit.  In fact, I'm only budgeting two classes for this (which stinks--one of my classes didn't even get to me today. The testing schedule was so crazy that our last class never happened and our third block just lasted twice the time.).  We have this week for evolution, then next week is REVIEW THE ENTIRE YEAR, and then the week after that is the big science tests.

Yay. Right?  Yay???

Anyway.  Because I didn't have much time, I had to make these two days good and worth it.  Today the lesson was focused on Natural Selection.  Thursday's lesson will be on classification, with a focus on reading and making dichotomous keys. 

I was SO excited about this lesson.  There were a lot of good interactive parts.

We started out with this Power Point activity:

Then we went to this website to play the actual game.  The online game allows you to make mutations to see if that can prolong your time on earth.  The kids loved it.  It's a fast game, so I had 3-4 students come up and try their hand at it.  Click here to go to the game.

Afterwards, we learned about Charles Darwin in this Power Point.  Who he was, what he did.  We talked about what evolution is and what natural selection is.

Then the kids had to create a project, which was indicated on the last slide of the second Power Point.  My example is below.  This is what I drew at home the night before.  In class I colored it up a bit to make it nicer. 

Example Student's project (kind of hard to see--the only camera I had available was my computer camera, and it's not very good. Apologies!)

The kids did really well with this assignment. I was pleased with the outcome. There was one last step, and that was to take their data from the chart at the beginning and make a graph from that.  This graph was attached to their project to show whether or not their species actually survived.  The graphing was hard for my kids.  We all figured it out eventually.