Central Dogma: DNA Extraction

After reviewing the Unit 4 final exams, it was evident students need additional practice writing scientific procedures.  Today, students were tasked with watching a short video of DNA extraction from a strawberry, writing a procedure for the experiment, and then working with their table partner to complete the experiment. By having to follow their own procedure, the concept of writing a procedure in enough detail for someone else to follow it was reinforced.  Students will use the procedures they wrote today to help them write a related procedure tomorrow.  Click here for today’s lesson and review the strawberry DNA extraction video below.

Advertisement

Central Dogma: Molecular Bonds

After spending the first half of class reviewing the DNA base pairing worksheet from Tuesday, we moved ahead with a survey of molecular bonds.  We focused on covalent and hydrogen bonds, with water molecules as our model molecules.  Students used the molecular modeling kits to model the interactions of water molecules at different temperatures before moving on to modeling the interactions of DNA nucleotides.  The lesson can be downloaded here.