This term, our topic is “Evolution and Inheritance”. Throughout this topic, we will be looking at human evolution and gene inheritance, among other things. So far, we’ve been looking at the inheritance side of things; activities include creating models of double helix DNA, creating flow charts of inherited traits between parents and their offspring and learning about cells. Our wall display is starting to take shape too, with our (in most cases) beautiful evolution and inheritance-based lettering and easy-to-understand definitions for complex scientific terms plastered all over the wall. This topic also opens up many opportunities for potential trips, which are, many people’s opinions, the best part of a topic! One of our upcoming highlights is when we will extract DNA from an onion.

This is the beginning for our wall display.

DNA made out of pipe cleaners and beads.

This is us making models of cells.

Here are some of the labelled cells.

The balloons represent the nuclei and the wool inside is to show the chromosomes.

We also made edible DNA. The strawberry pencils are the sugar phosphate backbone and the four bases (A-T and C-G) are made out of soft sweets.

by Espen and Sarah