Category: Science 11

Animal Investigation Labs: Self Assessment

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Curricular Response

Having the experiences of dissecting different types of animals in Biology 11 made me realize that doing these labs helped me understand more about the anatomy of each animal. It’s nice to have a kind of knowledge about how these animals are able to use their body with a variety of different kind of systems. For the squid dissection, I was able to learn a lot of things. I was able to tell if the sex of the squid is a female or a male, which you can see in the picture that both of the insides of the mantle are different. The one on the top is a female because it has a clear yellowy sequence of ovaries. The one on the bottom is a male because the sperm sac should look like a clear glue gooey sac. I also learned that it actually had two longer tentacles from the rest of the arms. I also was taught about how their process of excreting waste connects with how they use a water jet propulsion as their movement. With the help of a printed diagram with the labels of the body parts, I was able to identify them apart from each other. Using the notes were also helpful for me while doing the lab dissection to guide me throughout the process, along with Mr. Asano’s directions. 🙂

Core Competency Self Assessment

I really enjoyed the lab dissection of the squid because I had fun and learned more about squids that I did not know before. Just as I stated before, I feel more intelligent knowing these facts about how squids are able to work with their body type. I also liked doing this lab dissection because I bonded with my friends with experiencing this new subject idea that we have never done before. There were a few challenges that I’ve faced at the start of this lab, which was me being a germaphobe and not wanting to touch the squid at all, it also did not smell very nice but I was able to overcome it quickly as I realized that I needed to do this for the lab. I was also having trouble with taking the eyes out which led me to poke it incorrectly and there was a lot of blood squirting out of it. I overcame it as well as I had two squids which made me realize my mistake and performed it better on the other squid.

Unit Core Competency Assessment

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Alisha and I’s Virus Project

This virus project is what I enjoyed doing most during this unit because it taught me how to collaborate with my partner Alisha and grow as a team to complete this project. We had both communicated with each other about which sections of the project that we would do by dividing the work equally so that it would be fair to both of us. I did my research and shared the documents with her to figure out what we can add more and to be concise with the research, just in case others weren’t able to understand what was on the pamphlet. This part of the unit was definitely most memorable for me, I had just wished that we had used our time carefully in order to improve more things.

Natural Selection Critical Thinking Self-Assessment

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This is me participating in my Natural Selection lab. The activity was to transfer the licorice to the other side of the table to imply the amount of preys that were eaten by the predator, which in this case was me.

I collected and analyzed evidence by doing this lab to recognize which type of preys that we’d take in different environments (construction paper). In the picture above, I was doing this activity with the white paper, and it shows that the environment does not favour either of the preys because both colours don’t blend in with the paper. I also did this lab with a red and black background, and it showed the licorice blends in with their own colour. The sizes of the preys were also a factor for which ones I’d take, because I have long acrylic nails, I chose the bigger and thicker pieces of licorice to grab so it wouldn’t be as hard for me. My group had discussed about this activity and came to a conclusion that we all had fun doing this lab and it made us realize new things that we learned about the natural selection process.