Teaching

Do your students need practice writing protein sequences from a mRNA nucleotide sequence? I know mine always do! Here is a game I created that you can print out for your students to play against each other as they create the longest protein sequence they can, by rolling three dice to get the nucleotides for […]

Lately I’ve been exploring interactive games and activities that teachers can use to teach students concepts in science. (Check out my other two recently created games: the Organelle Card Game and Carbon Central) I play a lot of board games and card games (gamers classify these as “tabletop games”) and an idea came to my […]

I include Amazon affiliate links to the tools I’m using in this post because I know you’ll want to know and ask me what I used. If you click the link and buy a tool, I will get a few cents, which I will undoubtedly save in my Amazon account to use to purchase board […]

Recently, I picked up a new hobby: creating my own tabletop games! I have a bit of self-taught graphic design experience (as you readers of Science with Mrs. Lau know already) and recently I tried my hand at creating a new card game for my kids. My 9 year old son and I have been […]

Periodic Table Bingo: Engaging, interactive, and can be played with social distancing! I took a survey in the end of 2020 and teachers overwhelmingly told me they need engaging and interactive ways to work with students in their classroom AND online. My goal of 2021 is to create these types of experiences for teachers and […]

Blog Post Contributors: Ginny Mason and Bethany Lau This past year as I wrapped up my evolution unit, I had my students create science blackout poetry about the topics we covered in class. This is a fun way for students to express their big ideas and understandings about the topic. Blackout poetry served as an effective […]

Blog post contributors: Ginny Mason and Bethany Lau In-Class Evolution Lab Ideas Evolution is such an important unit in any biology curriculum. Not only does it help students develop a concept of both the relatedness and the diversity of all living things, it also serves to help build a conceptualization of additional biology topics such […]

Research Project for Inauguration Week or any week to celebrate current day scientists! Did you also get excited this past week when you saw the list of presidential science advisors? Whatever political party you belong to, learning about scientists and celebrating science is exciting! I love learning about their accomplishments and I love to see […]

This blog post was written in January 2021 and there may be new scientific discoveries since publishing that would change what we know about this virus. We live in a unique time where it has become even more clear that understanding biology is very important. At the moment, the virus SARS-CoV-2 is all over the […]

This past week, my goal was to create a short but meaningful winter-themed activity for teachers to use. During the holiday season, it can be tough to keep kids on task and this year is no exception. In this activity, the goal is to review the factor label method and do some stoichiometry-type questions with […]

This independent assortment and color your own karyotype lesson is now digital! For several years now, my Color Your Own Karyotype and Independent Assortment lesson has been loved and utilized by thousands of teachers and students all over the globe to really clarify the concept of Independent Assortment. It’s one of the first activities that […]

In all types of classrooms (remote, face-to-face, blended, everything in between), teachers are looking to use more versatile tools to help their students learn and interact with science content and one of these resources can be a digital notebook. One of these tools is called a Digital Notebook, or Digital Interactive Notebook. Karen Randazzo and […]