We raised £682 for Jeans for Genes day, well done everyone who brought in their £1 for non uniform, and to the staff who bought Mrs Essex's genetic mutation cakes. All the money raised will go so far in helping children with specific genetic disorders, and even help to provide support for their families in difficult times.
The Science department had such fun on Friday 20th September with loads of different activites based around genes. One of my year 9 classes began the day by decoding dragon DNA and producing a whole class full of baby dragons! Mr Essex's year 9s created faces using different genetic code, because there is so much code to choose from everyone's face was different... Much like how genetics works in real life :)
Year 7 & 8 spent their science lessons decoding messages in DNA then created their own individual DNA name bracelets. This was very fiddly, especially if you had a long name as every 1 of our letters worked out to be 3 DNA code letters! Mr Essex decided his name was too long for the DNA code to spell out in bracelets, so made one saying MR E instead. (A very good idea!)
My second year 9 class rounded the day off by creating models of the DNA helix with jelly babies and strawberry cables... Yum... Each jelly baby had to lose their head (eeek-glad I'm not a jelly baby!), and each head was paired to a new body, depending on the DNA code, you see out of the 4 bases (ATCG) A can only pair with T, and C can only pair with G... Once we had that sorted I asked my ladies to pose with their models as we discussed the benefits of using models to help our learning. Needless to say though, it wasn't long before all the sweets had been dismantled and eaten!
I didn't see my year 11s on Friday, but other teachers made DNA necklaces with theirs, not out of beads, but out of the students own DNA-how cool is that! They had to follow the scientific method very carefully in order to extract their own DNA structure and put it in a necklace vile for all to see. Just don't loose it, or we might find you have a clone out there one day...
I don't know about the rest of you, but I really enjoyed myself during this Jeans for Genes day, and I know my classes learnt a lot about different genetic diseases, how they come about and why it's important to keep raising money for this charity. Again, well done everyone!
Me (Miss Staples) with my DNA helix
No comments:
Post a Comment