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Dissections. Does the word make you cringe? Feel a little sick to your stomach? Fill you with dread? For many reasons dissections can cause concerns for educators, but they are a very important part of a child's education. Understanding how things work from the inside, is vital to developing a strong understanding of biology, physiology and anatomy. Thankfully there are many solutions available. So save yourself the mess and the stress in your lessons and labs with these options for virtual dissections.
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As a child I grew up in the country, doing animal rescue, breeding horses, and having a big sister who was a vet assistant (and eventually married a vet). Animals were my life. I entertained the idea of being a vet, a breeder, running a rescue or animal sanctuary. In the end, I enrolled in university into the bachelor of environmental sciences program, specializing in wildlife conservation. I wanted to protect endangered animals and their habitats.

However, two years into the program I was diagnosed with health issues that forced me to make some changes. I was loving my psychology programs, so I stayed in the sciences faculty, but moved over to the psychology department.

Now through all of that, the key was that I always worked with animals and had deep passion for biology and animals. Even in psychology, I specialized in the research field, and many of our labs worked with animals. But long before that, I started learning about what was under the skin from our vets, my sister and reading. I wanted to take the best care of my animals that I possibly could, so I was voracious in my search for information and knowledge.

With that came doing dissections, but also working on live animals. I've assisted on surgeries and so many medical procedures, it's too many to count. Learning in such a hands on way gave me a deep appreciation and understanding of anatomy, physiology and biology.

As much as I've learned from dissections, I totally get that they aren't for everyone. Some people struggle with the ethics, others the mess and smell, for others it's the cost, and sometimes it's simply a matter of logistics. Thankfully, there are a number of virtual dissection options available. Here are a few that I found.

Virtual Dissections

Next Level Homeschool Courses - Last year my kids took a shark course through Next Level and part of the course includes doing a shark dissection. Although you are given the information on how to order one to do your own dissection along with the instructor, you also have the option of just watching her do the dissection in the very educational videos.

Froguts - Is a very high quality, immersive virtual dissections and labs service that is available for a yearly subscription online or they now have an app. They cover a wide variety of labs and and lessons in anatomy and physiology. They even have labs on genetics.

The Biology Corner - This site offers many virtual dissection lessons and labs featuring a number of different dissections. They include worksheets and a quiz for some of their labs, however there are no videos. Reading and photography only. However, it is free.

The Science Bank - This is a lending library that specializes in learning options that remove the need for actual animals in dissections and labs. They have so many options, for all levels of education, including books, models, posters, and more. This is US only, so I have no experience with them, but the program was recommended to me by some American homeschoolers.

Late Nite Labs - This program is part of the educational publishing group MacMillian Learning. There is a cost to students, but you can watch a demo lesson here.

Getting Nerdy - If you like the idea of printable lessons, this store on TpT offers dissection lessons, workbooks, and 3-D paper models.

There are also many models, puzzles and coloring books that you can use as part of your unit studies. I especially love using these to supplement our lessons.

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Virtual Dissections and Labs - Save yourself the mess and stress

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Dissections. Does the word make you cringe? Feel a little sick to your stomach? Fill you with dread? For many reasons dissections can cause concerns for educators, but they are a very important part of a child's education. Understanding how things work from the inside, is vital to developing a strong understanding of biology, physiology and anatomy.

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Helping students understand genetics!

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Pigeonetics [Internet]. Salt Lake City (UT): Genetic Science Learning Center; 2014 [cited 2023 Nov 27] Available from https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/pigeons/pigeonetics/

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Master of Arts in Education: Learning and Technology And Single Subject Preliminary Credential

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A Science Teacher Sharing Ideas, Strategies and Original Curriculum for Biology, Life Science, and Anatomy & Physiology

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If you're . . .

new to teaching

new to Biology

feeling overwhelmed

just looking for something new to try

. . . then, here's my two cents on what you should do on the first day of school in your Biology class.

This plan developed over many years of trying just about everything. I even tried letting the students take turns reading through the syllabus. I'm not kidding. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking - I was just trying to get through it!

I am VERY detailed anyway, but I get crazy detailed when I'm nervous. Over-preparing allows me to sleep at night. So I actually wrote a "script" for the first day of school and many, many other days after that. But, for this post I'll keep the plan relatively brief and you can add your own touches to it.

Agenda on the board
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
THE PLAN

outside and direct them to find their seats by looking for their name on the desks. They'll figure this out - let them know that they're basically in alphabetical order if that helps.
See more on seating charts and why I'd never teach without one in the "10 Things" article mentioned below.
As soon as the bell begins to ring, come in, seating chart in hand, and stand right in the front, center of the room. As soon as the bell stops ringing, start speaking. Seem like too much? Skip it if you want to, but I did this every single day. Really.

I always greeted my classes with a warn welcome. Try an introduction like, "Good morning, I'm Mrs. Brooks. Welcome to first period College Prep Biology. Thanks for sitting in assigned seats. That really helps me check attendance and learn your names quickly." Students will do a lot of things they don't really want to do if you're nice about it and if they think they're helping you out.

as quickly as possible. Ask students to think about the word "biology", what it means and what they think they'll be learning this year. Encourage them to look around the room for some "hints" as you're checking attendance and making sure everyone is in the correct seat.

about the word "biology". Students usually know what the "-ology" part means, so write it on the board when they say it and tell them the 'bio" part if you have to. Brainstorm some topics that will be covered. Accept all answers, just as you would in any brainstorming session, and write them on the board as the discussion progresses.

Think some more about "Life" with the Frayer Model. I this for stimulating thinking! The Frayer model is a research-based strategy that helps students develop deep understandings of key terms. Get your FREE Frayer Model Activity HERE.

hand out worksheets

give brief instructions for the activity (Instructions are included in Teacher's Guide.)

get video ready as they are finishing up

ask for volunteers to share what they wrote, encourage others to add to their worksheet as they hear new ideas

no correction necessary, just be encouraging and positive about their thinking skills

Chances are, during your Frayer model discussion, something about "cells" will come up. So this next activity fits in the plan perfectly right here. "Inner Life of the Cell" is a 3-minute video developed by a cell biology group at Harvard several years ago. It's just short enough and awesome enough to really keep students' attention. I even showed this to parents during Open House one year.

And, by the way, there's a longer narrated version that you can show during your Cells chapter later.

Now that they've done some thinking, it's time for some-lighthearted fun!

It's FREE! Just click the image to get yours.

This ice-breaker game will not only help your students get to know each other, but it will also give you an opportunity to watch them in action and start learning their personalities.

Be sure to have your "Get into Groups" plan ready to go. Are they working at their desks? Or at lab tables? Have short, simple instructions prepared so this transition goes off without a hitch.

Since this will be the first time they're working in groups in your class, you'll want to state some quick rules. Here are my 3 basic rules for students working in small groups:

stay with your group

contribute to the group - do your part and respect others

keep voices at small group or table level (however you want to describe lowered voices)

Watch the clock and start clean-up about 5 minutes before the end of class. Have a plan for this transition, too. Do students need to return to their desks? Move their desks back into place? Are they turning anything in? Or saving it for later?

Every student should be in his or her assigned seat and listening before I dismiss them at the bell. Don't ever talk over them. Use your best manners - smile and say something nice like "great to meet you", "see you tomorrow", "thanks for a wonderful first day", etc.

And, if you have a minute or two to spare, this is the perfect time to ask if anyone has questions, restate some things that came up in class today, or give them an idea of what will be happening tomorrow. You might need to discuss that syllabus tomorrow, you know?

Need to make some adjustments?

Because every school schedule is different, here are a couple of places where you can easily tweak the plan:

#6: Frayer Model: Students can complete this at home and we'll revisit it tomorrow OR take it up, compile info, return tomorrow and use for discussion

#8: Ice Breaker Game: Stop game when time is up or continue the next day if you feel it needs more time

When you greet students at the door, they see that you care about them.

When your classroom is clean and organized, students see that you care about what you do.

When you're prepared - seating charts, agenda, and smooth transitions from one activity to the next, they'll see that you've got your teacher act together!
Teaching is very personal . . .
So, if this doesn't sound like it will work for you, I totally understand. Maybe there's something you can take away from this plan, but in the end, you have to do what feels right to you. The success of your school year has as much or more to do with your relationship with your students as it does with how much you know about Biology or how much they like the subject.

I'd love to hear your ideas about what to do on the First Day of Biology.

Finally, if you haven't read my two other "Back-to-School" posts, you can link to them here:
10 Things Every Science Teacher Should Do BEFORE the First Day of School 5 Common Mistakes Science Teachers Make on the First Day of School
Happy Back-to-School! Have a fantastic year teaching the BEST. SUBJECT. EVER!

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The First Day of Biology Class: A Step-by-Step Guide for Teachers - Science Island

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If you're . . . new to teaching new to Biology feeling overwhelmed just looking for something new to try . . . then, here's my two cents on what you should do on the first day of school in your Biology class. This plan developed over many years of trying just about everything.

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Twitter chats on science education

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I'm excited to share with you an EASY PEASY way for students to see osmosis in plant cells! In the past, I always used elodea leaves for this lab. Elodea can be hard to find at pet stores and is a little temperamental to keep alive. This year I decided to use onion skin from a purple onion and we got awesome results!
I used this lab BEFORE I taught any vocabulary such as osmosis, equilibrium, hypertonic, hypotonic, or isotonic. I wanted students to visually see what happens to cells in fresh water vs. salt water before I threw any vocabulary at them. Students were really excited to see the cells change within a matter of 60 seconds. Here are a few tips when doing this lab for the first time:

1. You cannot use the dry layers of the onion skin. You need to use the very top of the purple fleshy layer. It can be a little bit tricky to get a specimen that is thin enough, so I decided to do it myself and hand each kid a piece. I took metal tweezers, gently pushed them under the purple layer, and slid the tweezers out so a small flap of onion skin was loose. I peeled it off, handed it to each kid, and they set up their own wet mounts. No dye needed!

2. Have students make drawings using fresh water first. After they finished their drawing, they switched to salt water. To do this they do not need a new piece of onion, just leave it directly on the slide. Add a drop or two of salt water directly to the slide, no need to pre-soak the onion. Make sure your salt water solution is pretty saturated.
3. Tell students to wait at least 2 minutes before drawing the salt water image, because sometimes it takes a little time for the cytoplasm to shrivel up. Below are images of the onion cells in fresh water (left) and salt water (right) on 100x magnification. We had a discussion on whether or not the cell wall shriveled as well. Students automatically said yes, because the cell wall is almost transparent and harder to see. Once I told them to switch to high power (400x) they were able to see the cell wall more clearly and realize that the cell walls were still intact, while the membrane and cytoplasm shriveled.

Tomorrow we are going to follow up with the discussion of what happened and why. Students will take notes on osmosis and we will relate it to real world situations such as: Why can't I drink salt water if I'm stranded on a boat in the ocean? Why is my contact lens solution saline instead of pure water? Why do grocery stores spray the produce with water? If you want a quick worksheet to use as a formative assessment to follow this lesson, check out my tonicity and osmosis worksheet in my TpT store HERE.

I hope your students enjoy the lab as much as mine did! Other than having my classroom smell like onion for a day, it was a total win! Want more ideas? Check out this blog post that has 10 resources for teaching cell membranes!

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How to use an onion for your osmosis lab

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I'm excited to share with you an EASY PEASY way for students to see osmosis in plant cells! In the past, I always used elodea leaves for this lab. Elodea can be hard to find at pet stores and is a...

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Twitter chats on educational technology

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Recently, blog readers have asked me to write about scope and sequence in my biology class. Determining the best scope and sequence for your students is very difficult as a new teacher. It's so hard to know! What do I cover? When? And to what depth? I have found that my own personal preferred scope and sequence develop over time as I teach. In this blog entry, I'll try to touch on my own scope and sequence. I hope that this is helpful to the new biology teachers out there who might get a general idea of how long each unit takes. I know this would have helped me when I started! The sequence that I teach is pretty specific. The scope depends on the course I'm teaching (honors? college prep? inclusion?).

How do I determine which unit comes first in biology? Here is my sequence and some scope information below. I am for 1 lab a week, but that may depend on time, school schedule, and lab material availability. I post some lab ideas below and I hope to go more in depth into labs in my blog in future posts.

Biology Course Sequence: This is the course sequence I use. To new teachers, this may be different for your school or state's requirements, but this is what I do in southern New Jersey:

Introduction to Life, Measurement, and the Scientific Method (approx. 3 weeks) : This really is a catch-all sort of unit that goes over the basics that every science course should really cover. How to design an experiment. How to measure using lab measurement tools. What's a hypothesis? I like to do some basic labs in this unit to help students get on the same page, whatever their science background. I also discuss the characteristics of life, the basic domains of life, prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and basic classification (scientific names

Labs for biochemistry: Detecting Macromolecules Lab (using lab reagents to detect macromolecules in food), Water Properties Lab (I use stations to have students examine different properties of water.)

Labs for cells and organelles: we use the microscope a lot in this unit. I usually do one lab where they learn how to use the microscope, one lab where they examine slides of bacterial, animal, and plant cells, and another lab where we examine pond water organisms.

Cell Transport (approx. 3 weeks): Now that students know that living things are made of molecules, organized into cells and cellular compartments, how do living things get NEW atoms and molecules to replace the ones they have or grow? Cell transport can be a really difficult topic to teach and I have a blog entry about it. It's a tough topic for some kids but I love it. It's one of my favorites because I use a ton of animations and I have a ton of diagram coloring pages that I use with my students. Visuals are KEY.

Lab ideas for cell transport: Traditional diffusion lab with dialysis tubing (I actually don't like this lab a lot because students always get confused when I say it's NOT just like a cell membrane). I also like to do an onion cell (or water plant Elodea cells) lab where students examine cells before and after adding salty water to them, to see osmosis in action in a living cell. It doesn't always work really well and it depends on strong microscope skills.

Lab ideas for photosynthesis and respiration: During this unit, I like to do an enzyme lab (fresh liver plus hydrogen peroxide reaction, with different factors they change like temperature, pH) and I like to do a fermentation lab (students put yeast and different sugar solutions into test tubes and observe gas collecting in a balloon attached to the top of the test tube). Another lab that works well is a lab where students discover that plants also do respiration, using bean sprouts (from the grocery store!) and a pH indicator to show the pH of the water changes as respiration takes place.

Cell Division (approx. 3 weeks): Now that students understand what living things are made of (biochem and cells), they understand how cells get their new molecules (cell transport) and their energy (cell energetics), students can learn how you get new cells... from old cells! Usually many of my students remember some of mitosis from middle school, at least the basic idea. Here is where I focus on chromosomes, what they are, why they're important, and how they get from one cell into two cells. I introduce inheritance in this unit, that chromosomes are passed down from generation to generation. I do have them memorize mitosis and meiosis phase names, but this doesn't seem too difficult for them, at least that's what I've found. I focus on the differences between mitosis and meiosis, how one is used for somatic cells and one is used for reproductive cells. Pictures are essential for this unit and I wrote a blog post about teaching this unit. Animations are amazing to use in this unit. A lot of students really love this unit too! With more advanced students, I go into crossing over and how this increases genetic diversity. This unit, especially understanding meiosis, sets up students to succeed in the genetics unit.

Lab ideas for cell division: I like to have my students do a video project that they can work in on class. My students also do a recognizing-mitotic-cells under the microscope lab (with onion root tip cells), and sometimes an extension on this where students calculate the length of each mitotic phase based on how many cells they see in each phase.

Lab ideas for protein synthesis: (if I have the equipment) gel electrophoresis, restriction enzymes and gel electrophoresis, human cheek DNA isolation or strawberry DNA isolation

Lab ideas for genetics: when I have the resources, fruit flies!!!!!!!!!! Fruit flies is a huge time investment and it takes at least 3 (sometimes 4 if the flies aren't growing fast enough) lab weeks to do it justice (1: collecting and setting up matings, 2: observing F1 progeny and setting up the second mating, 3: counting F2 progeny (I have them count 100 flies!)) But it is the lab the students remember for years to come and I love giving them the chance to do "real" genetics in my class.

Evolution (approx. 2 weeks): This unit works really well after genetics. Evolution is really about how population genetics of organisms change over time. I start with Hardy Weinberg equilibrium, because that ties very directly into genetics and shows how evolution occurs over time in populations. You may think that the math is too difficult for students to complete, but I use this activity I designed, one that requires only calculating averages! After understanding microevolution, my students learn about Lamarck, Darwin, and newer evolutionary theories (punctuated equilibrium etc). We go over evidence for evolution (and a few pieces of evidence that scientists don't yet understand). Natural selection is one of the huge concepts that I hit hard in this unit (I actually mention it a lot all year).

Lab ideas for evolution: I love to do a bacterial antibiotic resistance lab (when I have the resources) and a simulation where students examine change over time in a population. I've done several things (a bird beak simulation, a candy natural selection simulation) but i'm always looking for a better idea here!

Ecology (approx. 2 weeks): Once students know what living things are made of, how living things make more living things, and how living things in populations change over time, I tie it all together with Ecology. Ecology is really the culmination of my standard biology year. Students learned about how populations change in the evolution unit. Now they learn how populations in communities affect each other and how these cause change to the planet over time. In this unit, I talk about biomes, producers vs consumers, and community relationships (symbiosis, competition, predation, etc). I find this to be one of the easiest units of the year and this works well for my class because in New Jersey, we have a standardized test right after this unit, a test that covers all 10 of these units I've mentioned so far.

Lab ideas for ecology: If the school allows, I love to take the students outside of this unit. We examine parts of plants, take wildlife surveys if we can and time allows.

The rest of the year (whatever time we have left!): Because of timing, I may or may not cover other units at the end of the year. I love to do a unit on Bacteria, Viruses, and Immunology here. In some years, I've had time to go into major body systems like the digestive system, the cardiovascular system, and the nervous system. This changes from year to year. Lab ideas: In the most recent school I worked at, we all did a huge fetal pig dissection at the end of the year to follow a unit on major body systems. I can be honest with you all: dissections are NOT my favorite. 🙂 But I do them because a lot of students learn from them and love them.

So there you have it, my scope and sequence for high school biology. How do you teach biology differently? What works best for you? I love to hear about different teaching strategies, so please leave me a comment below!
If you are looking for a comprehensive homework bundle (for the whole year, all 10 of my units!), check it out here!

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Scope and Sequence in my Biology Class - Science and Math with Mrs. Lau

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Recently, blog readers have asked me to write about scope and sequence in my biology class. Determining the best scope and sequence for your students is very difficult as a new teacher. It's so hard to know! What do I cover? When? And to what depth?

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An alternative to Kahoot

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An alternative to classic slides

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Pear Deck is on a mission to help teachers create powerful learning moments for every student, every day - using the tools you already know and love.

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@JMulhernBiology

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