Reproductive System

Below you will find the following activities to enhance your instruction of the reproductive system.  Items with an asterisk are shorter and could easily be incorporated into class.
1) Merging Flash Cards
2) Seinfeld ‘Mulva’ Party
3) The Sex Connection
4) Fetal Development
5) Reproducing with the Stars*
6) Filming Meiosis
7) Songs for the reproductive system*

1) MERGING FLASH CARDS:

Make flash cards for the process of egg development / release to fertilization in one color and flash cards for the process of sperm development / travel to fertilization in another color. Arrange the cards on the floor with each branch of activity (male and female) coming from a different direction to meet in the middle.

2) SEINFELD ‘MULVA’ PARTY.  (Jerry once dated a woman named Mulva.)

Everyone must come to the party as a part or process of the reproductive system. They should choose a name that rhymes with their assigned part or process and they must display information about their part or process on their clothes / body. It’s sort of like being a bunch of walking posters. Optionally people could also bring a snack that in some way rhymes with, represents, or is like their part or process. A file card should accompany the snack explaining the connection. Video the whole thing for review – maybe post on Blackboard and try not to eat too many Vienna sausages!

3) THE SEX CONNECTION:

Encourage students to understand the connection between every element of what they are studying and sex. Sex is after all very interesting, so if they can relate all of it to sex in some way they may retain more.  In other words how does every system, pathway, process and body part relate to sex or affect sexual activity?

4) Fetal Development
Here is a group exercise that encourages students to investigate fetal development and the effects of alcohol on a developing fetus.  The group exercise includes an abbreviated version of fetal development and four case studies wherein a pregnant woman drank alcohol of different amounts and at different times during their pregnancy.  Challenge your students to make the risks associated with consuming alcohol more specific.  Which systems or stages of development would be most heavily affected by the different mothers drinking habits?
NOVA (PBS) classroom activity

5) Reproducing with The Stars
Challenge students to think of positive and negative traits of celebrities.  Then, assuming a simple dominant/recessive relationship of alleles for those traits (also ignoring the entire nature/nurture controversy entirely), mate celebrities and see what their offspring might be like.  The class or group must first agree on whether traits are dominant or recessive, and then Punnett Squares can help predict phenotypes of celebrity breeding.  Encourage the use of funny traits such as “ability to make a career out of a disaster/single hit/or jail sentence,” or “augmentable breasts,” or “beauty greater than talent.”

6) Filming Meiosis
In an article in Encyclopedia Britannica on-line taken from Science Teacher, December 2008 by Austin M. Hitt & Christopher Bogiages, the authors suggest having students make their own stop animation films of mitosis and meiosis.  Using the models you have in class, or by making their own models or drawings, the students can take a picture of each step (or sub-step if they make transitional models) which can then be strung together into a film.  The motion, and the process of setting it up in the proper sequence may help students better remember the process as a process, rather than as a series of models with labels on the bottom. http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/35725678/MOVIE-MITOSIS

7) Songs from “Groovin in the Hippocampus”
Menses, Menses (menstruation)
The Ballad of Cap & Corona (gamete movement and fertilization)
You can hear clips and download theses songs from the home page of this website