Actually Teaching It
"Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand."
We would like to discuss briefly some ways to present the subject heredity that will promote inquiry in your students and promote the scientific process and problem solving in general. The scientific process, by definition, is made up of six parts: observing, communicating, classifying, measuring, inferring, and predicting. Heredity can be studied using each of these processes.
Observing
By looking at pictures of parents and children, students can improve their observation skills. Similarities between parents and their children can sometimes be subtle. Students must learn to note the eye color, the height of the cheek bone, the set of the shoulders, etc.
To facilitate this activity, the teacher can go through examples and then pose various questions.
 | What color is the person's hair? |
| How tall is the person? |
| Describe the person's nose. |
| Are the person's shoulders wide or narrow? |
| Does the person smile with teeth? |
Communicating
After observing physical similarities and differences between photos, it is important for the students to be able to express those observations accurately. Descriptions like " His nose looks funny." obviously would not be acceptable. Yet something like " His nose is long and bent to his right." is descriptive and specific.
Classifying
After describing each photo precisely enough, the student must then be able to classify them by various observed traits. This forces the student to construct some order to the photos. The teacher could ask for groupings such as:
| wavy vs. curly hair |
| eye color |
| high vs. low cheek bones |
| long sloped nose vs. short stubby nose |
Measuring
This process could prove extremely difficult with photos, but certain traits can be measured relatively. The fathers could be arranged in order according to height. The mothers could be arranged in order of length of hair.
Inferring
The process of actually matching the parents to their children could be considered inferring. The student is inferring what caused the traits in each child. This is where much of the subject, discussed on the previous page, would actually be applicable. The student must consider what traits are dominant and which are recessive, and which would then become part of the child.
Inference is not an exact process, and neither is matching the parents to their children. After such an involved process, the student might still make the wrong matches. This poses an important aspect. The student can not be evaluated on how well he has matched up the photos, but by how he has followed the process.
Predicting
This could be the fun part of the project. The student could actually predict what the children's offspring might look like. This might be done by drawings, or even computer imaging, although that might be a little advanced.
Added Benefits
This lesson not only benefits the students in terms of learning the scientific process, but hopefully also in their own lives. If a child goes home and asks his parents for family photos, it opens up a wonderful opportunity for the parents to share with their child, not only pictures, but experiences. We are all so busy these days that sometimes it takes something important like a school assignment to require us to stop and share some quality time with our children.
Then when the children bring their photos to school, they have something valuable that they can share with their classmates. It becomes more than just an activity. Using the kids photos in an activity relates the subject to each and every child.
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