This year in biology the thing that I have grown most in is my understanding on how our bodies are different from one another and what causes it. This is my biggest growth because at the beginning of the year I did not understand how our body selected what traits we had and I did not understand where these traits came from.

 

Disputed maternity packet. The purpose of this packet was to first make us think about how things are decided when we are being created that makes us who we are. Then throughout the packet we read about a person named “KF” who was a victim of disputed maternity. Then our purpose was to find out if it was possible for this to happen or if they were truly not her kids. The process that we took to complete this project was to first make predictions about how this could have happened and then we read through and answered questions as a class and individually about the case, and then we learned about making pedigrees and punnet squares to determine how a person gets their genotype/phenotype which is their physical and genetic traits. Once we worked through the packet we started a project called the genetic disease project were we used the information we gathered on a person’s case to answer the question that they are asking. Finally after researching and writing our genetic counseling report we made power point slide so that we could answer the person’s questions.

 

An artifact that I am going to be using for this is the disputed maternity packet. This packet is what we used to learn the concepts and terms we needed to know to be able to answer our person’s questions. The one part of the packet that I think helped me most throughout this process is the section about punnet squares. A punnet square is how we determined what a person would be born with. The example we used was tulips. R=red r=white if we have to flowers that are both Rr than we have a 50% chance that we will have a pink flower (red and white combined)

 

Another project that I am going to talk about is the frozen frog’s project where we learned about a frog called the Hyla Chrysoscelis. The purpose of this project was to learn about the Hyla and how freezes during the winter and unfreezes during the summer but is still alive. First we started by reading a few paragraphs about the frog and its environment and then we made our first draft model of how we thought the frog survived, we did this using the knowledge we learned in the prior lesson. Then we did a lab on how it freezes and survives by designing our own experiment and then carrying it out the best that we could. The point of this lab was to see if any of us could make it so the beet (what we were using instead of the frog) would not “Lyse” or bleed because of broken cells that were frozen. Then once we did the lab we learned about what the frog really did and took notes on terms that we had just learned. Our final product created during this project was a model of the cell that shows how the frog lets the water out to make it so it does not die when frozen.

 

The artifact that I am going to use from this project is the final model from the Hyla Crysoscelis packet that we used in class. This was what we made to show that we understood what the frog was doing to withstand being frozen. The biggest part of this model that we learned about was how the frog’s cells let water out of the cell before being frozen so that the cells don’t break when being frozen. The cells do this through osmosis which is how water moves throughout the cells in our body. What the frog does is it replaces the water molecules with sugar molecules that it gets from food it eats just before the freezing process. So once this swap has occurred the water molecules that were inside the cell are now outside and the sugar is now inside instead of outside. This means that when the water freezes it will not break the cells of the frog and once it is warm again the frog can reverse the process and “return to life”.