Welcome!

Kia ora,

Welcome to my Bio 200 blog.

As promised at the recent Meet the Teacher session, I have created a blog for the class.

Obviously we have already been learning biology whilst at school, so this blog will start giving more information about what we are doing as the terms progress.

This is an update on what we have done so far:

We started the year with ventilation in insects, fish and mammals. The class has made notes on surface area, Flick's Law and the ventilation systems in insects and fish. They have carried out dissections of green lipped mussels, crickets and fish heads. One of the assessment tools was for students to either draw and label sequences of diagrams showing the dissection or create a video (labelled and, hopefully, narrated). Using technology appropriately should help students recall in future assessments.

Once we had dissected the fish, we changed topics completely (we will revisit and continue in June, following the Lake Rotoiti trip).

We are now studying ecology and moving onto practical techniques. This is so that they are fully prepared for the trip (which has two internal assessments available).

I am hoping to be able to up date this blog regularly so that the boys can recall the lesson content more easily and so that parents can also see what we are up to.