12/3

This week, students were introduced to the basic principles of heredity and genetics. We looked into Gregor Mendel's scientific investigations with pea plants and did a "pollination" activity to see if our results matched up with his second experiment. On Wednesday, each student had the chance to observe their physical characteristics and those of our classmates in order to determine whether our classmates had more dominant or recessive traits. Out of the 10 traits we observed, we found that this year's 7th graders exhibit an equal number of dominant and recessive traits. On Thursday, we began using Punnett squares to determine all possible outcomes of a cross between two organisms. We will continue our work with Punnett squares next week, and we will begin to examine X-linked traits and Punnett squares.