Pupils can use the sheet to construct a branching key. The 8 aliens depicted vary in the number of legs and antennae they have, and in their body shape. The exercise is made easy by the fact that pupils can look at the characteristics in any order, and the key will still work out so that each individual can be identified by a unique set of characteristics. The drawing itself is basic to say the least, and if anyone wants to make it look a bit more sophisticated I’d be glad of a copy. But it works really well. It was used in several Scottish first year classes studying Ecosystems.

This is a table, intended to be cut up into individual cards. Pupils sort the cards according to whether or not the characteristic can be inherited. Some of them are fairly obvious, like blue eyes, and some are ambiguous (e.g. deafness might or might not be inherited). The class can then have a discussion on what contributes to our characteristics. The activity was created for a Scottish S1 class doing Reproduction and Genetics. By the way the Yes/ No/ Not sure cards are not in any particular place in the table.

One is a chart for recording various measurements of the local ecosystem - soil temperature, humidity, quadrat results etc. The other is a worksheet for a pitfall trap experiment - pupils have space to explain what they are doing, where they have hidden their traps, method, diagram, results etc. The idea is that this gets printed 2-sided - i.e. print P1 on one side of the paper and P2 on the other side, providing 2 sets per A4 sheet - but you will need to play with the margins to get this to work without cutting off some words! (I’ll upload it agin when this is sorted). Of course you could just print one side per sheet. Both charts were used in a Scottish first year course on Ecosystems.