OpenSciEd Unit 8.5 · Lesson 12 · 12.A
Look for: Students should populate their Progress Track…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
12.A.3 Plan and carry out an investigation to produce data to serve as the basis for evidence that plants have genetic material inside their cells that can be visualized (scale).
What to look / listen for
Students should populate their Progress Tracker with ideas that demonstrate that evidence collected during the investigation supports the claim that genetic material is also found in plant cells. While every cell has genetic material, cells are very small, so to visualize the genetic material we need to extract it from many cells and separate the genetic material from the other cell parts.
What to do
Hold up the genetic material that a group collected to help students connect that this stuff we pulled out is a physical, 3-D structure that we can see without a microscope. One feature about its structure is that it’s really long! So when it clumps together we can see it with our eyes. You can pull up slide F to remind students of the function of the alcohol in the protocol with regard to the clumping.