Creating lesson plans is one of the most thought out processes that a teacher does during the school year. It can always be a challenge, but there are always lesson plans and ideas that someone else has come up with to build upon and take away from.
Creating a lesson from this experience has been a bit more challenging because it is fresh and new. One of the first challenges that come up was how it was going to fit into 7th grade science curriculum. In 7th grade, we definitely do not teach about face mites and we also do not teach about evolution and phylogeny. What we do teach is DNA, but we do not get as in depth as we have as the scientist at the museum, not even close.
Since #teammite has one 8th grade teacher and two 7th grade teachers, we decided to do a “whole picture” lesson on the process of science: scientific inquiry and build mini-lessons within that fit into 7th or 8th grade curriculum.
The other challenge we faced was how we were going to teach collecting data when we couldn’t do the same process as the lab such as DNA extraction, PCR, and Gel Electrophoresis. The big question that the students are going to research is, “Do middle school students have mites? At what age”. We are going to be able to sample the students for mite DNA and send them off to the lab for Dr. Dan Fergus to extract the mite DNA, PCR, and run a gel. So that the students will be better under what Dr. Fergus is doing, we are going to let them do virtual labs of the processes, and possibly do DNA extraction from strawberries, but explain that Dr. Fergus needs more specialized equipment to extract DNA from mites because they are so tiny!
Even though we cannot do the more complicated processes ourselves, I am so excited to teach the REAL process of scientific inquiry and bring the pore mites back up when we get to our genetics unit!
