Connecting my externship to my classroom is going to be challenging, but do able. Pieces of the work I am doing fit in to several areas of the NC Essential Standards for 8th grade. So, my current plan is to have a series of lessons scattered through the year that bring in mites to teach or reinforce the content.

There are many pieces of the mite project.  The main one is the citizen science piece.  I plan to introduce citizen science at the beginning of the school year and actually do citizen science with my students by collecting samples from the willing students and send the samples back to the lab.

Later in the year I can use tools that I have learned about in the lab to show my students that real science is still concerned with the topics we talk about.  My mentor has taught a couple of college classes and has ideas for lessons that he has used in the past which can be tweaked for a younger audience.  For example, he has a lesson using the phylogeny of HIV DNA to show how to disease moved through a population.  I am planning to use this idea, but simplify it for a lesson during my diseases unit.

Even later in the year, when we get our class data and DNA sequences of mites back we will use computer programs to create phylogenies with our mites.  I plan to use this lesson during my evolution unit.  In the past my evolution unit has focused on fossil records and geologic time.  I am excited to add in information about creating phylogenies so that my students will be able to see another side of evolution.  I think that this will give my students a little charge of curiosity and excite them about a topic that seems distant and finished to them.

Using the mites throughout the year and connecting the many pieces of my curriculum to them will show my students that scientists use all areas of science in their work.