One of the challenges I faced in teaching evolution to SBI3U was making an abstract concept something the students could grasp. Evolution is a subject fraught with misconceptions and can be a very hard process to imagine. Like all of science, there is a particular language that surrounds this topic and was important for my students to understand. In order to make this a more accessible area of study, I developed a kinesthetic activity to demonstrate how natural selection can act on a species and affects allele frequency.
The dragon genetics lab is a great consolidation activity that I used at the end of the genetics unit. My students loved their dragons so much that we decided to bring them along into our exploration of evolution.
Dragon Evolution A Kinesthetic Way to Model Allele Frequency Changes
Jennifer Quinn – 2014 Galbraith winner