Another excellent resource from HHMI for teaching evolution and classification: students basically classify 13 of the finch species on the Galapagos and learn about how they came to be how they are along the way.
I’m looking forward to using this in between my evolution and taxonomy units to give students an idea of the thought process scientists go through in classifying a new species, or even a group of new species.
Check it out here.
This is a fun yeast lab that can be used to teach about Fungi in a Taxonomy unit, or to teach about anaerobic respiration in the Cellular Respiration Unit, or just as a simple introduction to inquiry:
It focuses on how much CO2 yeast produce in environments with different amounts of sugar in them. My students generally found that the yeast produced the most CO2 for 1mL and 5mL of sugar solution.
To make it inquiry-based:
Thoughts and Tips:
From the Students:
“I have never done any labs in my past years in science and it felt like an actual experiment was occurring and it was a very interesting topic”
“It was cool to see something blow up with touching it”
A new human species was discovered this year in the Rising Star Cave just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Could this be the next step in figuring out how Homo sapiens came to be?
The New York Times reports in this article: Homo Naledi, New Species in Human Lineage, Is Found in South African Cave
On Teaching 