This week my students enjoyed a fun biochemistry lab where they had to examine the stomach contents of a victim to determine where the victim had his last meal. Through this investigations students practiced procedure writing, lab safety and used chemical indicators to test for carbohydrates (glucose and starch), lipids and proteins.
One of the biggest challenges for teaching biology is helping students learn the vocabulary that is foreign to them. I took to a beach ball to assess what the students knew about each of the macromolecules.
Anytime you can get a part of the beach into your classroom you need to take advantage of it. This activity works great to supplement the Biochemistry Boxing Activitythat you can get free here by signing up for email updates.
Vocabulary Activity
To do this activity you will need a beach ball and a dry erase marker. Write the names of the macromolecules or any vocabulary terms on each section of the beach ball.
Toss the ball to the students and when they catch it they look to see where their right thumb lands and say the definition of the word their thumb landed on.
I then have the students throw the ball back to me to prevent them from being tempted to bounce it off their classmates heads.
Participation is 100% and it allow me to assess their knowledge of the vocabulary. If a students thumb lands on wild they get to pick the vocabulary term. The kids did not want to stop this activity.
