Instructional activities: students can discuss in groups their prior knowledge of DNA and how proteins are made. They will then work with their group to come up with one way changes in DNA change traits in a living organism. The groups will finally come together and share their ideas as a class. This will engage and introduce the students to the ideas of DNA and proteins.

Instructional activities: give students a colored chain of beads with different colors being labeled as different amino acids. Then elaborate that the different chemical properties of the amino acids leads them to attract or repel each other. Show with the beads how this leads to folding and the overall shape of the chain changing, much like how proteins fold into their final shape. Then explain how the proteins are sorted and processed in the endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparatus to them to assigned and sent to their final place in the cell where they can begin working. This will help elaborate on how RNA finally becomes a protein and how proteins become the shape and size they need to be in order to fit in the cell where the protein is needed to do its "job."

Instructional activities: Start by giving the students a codon table and giving and explanation on how it works. Then give the students a list of 20 amino acids and have them use the codon table to translate the 3 letter base does into the 20 unique amino acids. This gives students a chance to explore and figure out DNA translation themselves.

Instructional activities: Start the lesson plan with an interactive video, linked above. Next Show students sentences that have unnecessary/incorrect letters, i.e. Thx dg goss for a wnlk, and ask, how could we fix this sentence? Then explain RNA processing, and show how it is similar to the example, with introns and exons being the "fixes" to RNA.

Instructional activities: The students will be given a quiz that starts with just a DNA strand, then has a section for them to explain how it is transcribed into an RNA strand. The next section of the quiz the student will have to use a provided codon table to translate the RNA into amino acids. Finally based on the shape and chemical properties of the amino acid the student will make a guess about what the proteins function could be and where it is most likely going in the body. By evaluating the students like this we can see where their weaknesses and strengths are in these topics, and it can be demonstrated by the students their ability to meet the core standard, that they will be able to "Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the structure of DNA determines the structure of proteins which carry out the essential functions of life through systems of specialized cells" (HS-LS-1.1).