“What if you could feel no pain?” I pose this question each year to sixth graders and the responses are always both varied and creative. At first thought, most say that they would enjoy being able to have this characteristic. However, after we read a story about Gabby, a girl that feels no pain, their minds are often changed. Hereditary Sensory Autonomic Neuropathy (HSAN) is an inherited disease, but my attempts to explain this to my students generally only cause confusion since the students do not have sufficient background in genetics. This conundrum was my inspiration for creating this unit. I hope to use the material described in this unit to expose my students to basic genetics concepts and vocabulary so that when they arrive in seventh grade they feel confident in linking the information they learn to the background knowledge from our time together.
Mariner Middle School is a grade six through eight secondary school located in Milton in Sussex County, DE. Our school has separate wings for each grade level and we offer departmentalized teaching environments. I am responsible for teaching general science. The sixth grade curriculum includes units on the Scientific Method, Human Body, Forces That Cause Motion, Electricity, and Earth History. The district is full of middle class families, although there are some areas that house high percentages of low-income students. The surrounding area contains both agricultural and business districts, and, in the summer months, becomes a resort town. My particular school has high number of low-income families so we qualify as a CEP school (Community Eligibility Provision) and offer all students free breakfast and lunch..
The unit is designed to meet both Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core Literacy Standards. The activities are designed for middle-school students, but could be modified to meet the needs of higher learners by adjusting the lexile of the materials. Students at the elementary level could complete the activities, but teachers may need to modify the questioning strategy to be more developmentally appropriate for the age range that is being taught. The unit also meets Delaware State Science Standards in both inquiry and life science. Standard One (Nature and Application of Science) will be met through the activities related to generating questions about the content. Standard Six (Life Processes) states that students should understand that living systems, from the cellular to the organismic level, demonstrate complementary nature of structure and function. This standard will be met through the literacy and reading component of the unit.
Rationale
The students I teach have a wide range of ability levels, but they also have a wide range of background knowledge. My pre-assessment for the Human Body unit is always the same: I give each student a blank sheet of paper with the outline of the human body sketched for them, and ask them to draw what is inside that keeps us alive. The first few years I did this, I was shocked at how many early-adolescent students could put nothing in the graphic organizer. It was as if they thought we were kept alive by fairies and magic. One of my biggest goals is for my students to be scientifically literate when they leave my classroom. I want them to have enough content knowledge, as well as exposure to content area reading materials, so that they can read and understand documents as adults. I also want them to be skeptical of what they read.
The design of the human body curriculum lends itself to teaching mini “units” on each system. When I teach the nervous system, I try to get students to think about what happens when “things go wrong.” That is where the lesson on Gabby and HSAN helps focus discussion on our body’s defense mechanisms. The kids are intrigued, but also confused, when I try to explain that she can have symptoms of a disease, when neither her parents, nor sister, are affected. While they know that some diseases can be contagious, we are just beginning to address non-communicable diseases. We do a short case study on Pellagra, and the lack of niacin in diets of poor people in the south in the late 1800s. This give the students some background on a non-communicable disease caused by nutrition, but does not address hereditary mechanism for disease. From anecdotal discussions, it seems most students understand that you get a “mix” of “stuff” from your parents, which is why you may resemble them. However, my students are reluctant to offer ideas or explanations of why someone would have a phenotype so different than their parents (for example: presenting with a disease, even though no one else in the family has the disease).
Inevitably, because of this lack of comprehension, I have to do a short “crash course” on genes and inheritance. I would like to learn more about the basics of genetics so that I am able to explain the concepts at a level of understanding appropriate for sixth graders. I am particularly interested in teaching my students about the role of genetics in disease.
My unit will build to a culmination in which students generate high-level questions to ask scientists during a video-conference. I want them to be able to understand the content of what we read and discuss in class, and also to use higher order thinking skills to synthesize and pose new questions. This will require texts that are accessible for students at various reading levels and will also require me to have a deeper understanding of the content that I am asking them to read. I aspire for my students to generate questions that require abstract and complex reasoning as well as investigations or applications to real world work.
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