Purpose statement
This unit is focused around the question, “Are we too clean?” While we learn concepts about bacteria, we look at how bacteria are everywhere, and less than 1% of them are harmful, and many of the other 99% can even be quite beneficial. This unit connects to students’ lives because they interact with bacteria every moment of every day, and oftentimes take measures to kill bacteria. Study of these concepts will help students decide if we are too clean: do we kill so many good bacteria that it could actually be harmful to us? On the other hand, bacteria can cause disease, and we have to take into account that there are viruses that can also cause disease, and while many are harmless, there aren’t really beneficial viruses (except for their use in vaccines and biotechnology).
This unit falls into the beginning of learning about kingdoms of living things, starting from the smallest and most simple, and leading up to more complicated organisms. Throughout this sequence of units, students will learn how scientists classify living things, as well as many characteristics common to all living things.
Throughout a lot of this unit, students are doing their own thing, and thus have a chance to work to their ability and their interest. In the bacteria lab, which requires students to design their own investigations, students learn about factors affecting bacterial growth by picking a possible factor that is interesting to them. Also, working in groups of two or three is considered to be most beneficial to learning because with multiple people, it’s harder to get stuck, so that plays into the different abilities as students, and with so few people, it’s harder for somebody to be left out of the learning process. The argumentative writing project allows students to research bacteria and viruses and find examples that are interesting to them. I provide the students with the rubric beforehand, as well as guidelines for scientific argumentations, so students will know my expectations. Different abilities will mean that some arguments will be more sophisticated than others, but no matter the ability, students should be able to meet the clear, and somewhat basic expectations for any scientific argument.
This unit falls into the beginning of learning about kingdoms of living things, starting from the smallest and most simple, and leading up to more complicated organisms. Throughout this sequence of units, students will learn how scientists classify living things, as well as many characteristics common to all living things.
Throughout a lot of this unit, students are doing their own thing, and thus have a chance to work to their ability and their interest. In the bacteria lab, which requires students to design their own investigations, students learn about factors affecting bacterial growth by picking a possible factor that is interesting to them. Also, working in groups of two or three is considered to be most beneficial to learning because with multiple people, it’s harder to get stuck, so that plays into the different abilities as students, and with so few people, it’s harder for somebody to be left out of the learning process. The argumentative writing project allows students to research bacteria and viruses and find examples that are interesting to them. I provide the students with the rubric beforehand, as well as guidelines for scientific argumentations, so students will know my expectations. Different abilities will mean that some arguments will be more sophisticated than others, but no matter the ability, students should be able to meet the clear, and somewhat basic expectations for any scientific argument.