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Lesson Plan — ILAW · Science 8

Term 1 · Week 4 · Domain: Life Science · CG Quarter 1, competency 5

⚠️ The field list is reported, not read. The four section names are consistent across sources; the sub-fields a given division expects may differ. See source-catalogue.md §8.

This is the whole week. For Day 1 at teaching depth, see lesson-plan.md.

Learning Area Science
Grade Level Grade 8
Term and Week Term 1, Week 4
CG source Quarter 1, competency 5 (p. 51)
Sessions 5 × 45 minutes
Medium of instruction English
Resources slides.html · game.html · worksheet.html · worksheet-remediation.html · wall-chart.html · offline-activities.md
Format ILAW — DO No. 009, s. 2026

I — INTENTIONS

The competency for this week

CG Quarter 1, competency 5: predict simple ratios of offspring genotypes and phenotypes in crosses involving dominant/recessive gene pairs.

Why it sits in Week 4

Week 3 is competency 4 — represent patterns of inheritance of a simple dominant/recessive characteristic through generations of a family. That is a pedigree: a record of what happened. Week 4 turns the same idea forwards and asks what might happen next, which is a different kind of claim and a harder one.

Weeks 5 to 7 leave heredity for classification, the cycles of nature, and photosynthesis. So this is the only week in the quarter where probability is on the table, and if it is not settled here it is not settled at all — it returns in Grade 9 Quarter 3 with DNA, genes and chromosomes, by which point the Punnett square is assumed.

It also sits in the middle of the quarter for a practical reason. The coin work needs a full session and the class needs to have met the vocabulary in Week 3 already; putting it in Week 2 would mean teaching genotype, phenotype and probability in the same forty-five minutes.

Success criteria for the week

By the end of the week, the learner:

  1. completes a 2 × 2 Punnett square correctly from two parent genotypes
  2. gives the genotype ratio and the phenotype ratio separately, and says why they differ
  3. states that a ratio is a chance for each offspring, not a share of a family
  4. explains how two parents showing a dominant trait can have offspring showing the recessive one

These four are the tick boxes on observation-card.html.

II — LEARNING EXPERIENCES

Day Focus What happens Resources
1 Fill it, then interrogate it IR8 rice, three genotypes, the square in minute twelve. Then the four-seed question, the class vote, and ten coin flips each that disagree with it. lesson-plan.md · slides 1–14 · worksheet.html
2 Both ratios, every time Six crosses, each answered twice — genotype ratio and phenotype ratio. Groups swap papers and mark each other's, and a single ratio given for both columns is sent back. Activity 1 in offline-activities.md · game.html Rounds 1–2
3 A hundred flips Groups of five, a hundred flips each, pooled into a class total of two thousand. The scatter at ten, at a hundred and at two thousand, drawn on the board as three bar charts. Activity 2 · slides 9–10
4 Traits in this room Tongue rolling, earlobes, widow's peak, counted. Is the dominant trait the more common one? Sometimes; and the class works out why the question was never the right one. Activity 3 · slides 13–14
5 Consolidation and check The game, all three rounds. The weekly check. Worksheets returned and ★ discussed at length — it is the item most of the class will have got wrong. game.html · assessment.md §4

The shape of each day

Part Minutes What happens
One cross, both ratios 5 A cross on the board; the class calls the four cells, then both ratios
Review 3 Yesterday's misconception, restated by a learner
Main activity 25 The day's focus
Into practice 7 Worksheet, game, or offline activity
Close 5 Exit ticket — one probability question about one family

Every exit ticket this week is about a single family, not a population. That is where the misconception lives, and asking about four hundred seeds all week would let it survive untouched.

III — ASSESSMENT

What is looked at, and when

Instrument Day Component it feeds
Observation card — the learner's exact words 1–5, continuous Formative only, no mark
Worksheet, Sections A to C 1 Written Works
Peer-marked ratio sheet 2 Formative only, no mark
The pooled coin data 3 Written Works — the learner's own hundred, recorded and totalled
Class trait survey 4 Written Works
Game record, Round 3 5 Formative only, no mark
Weekly check, 7 items 5 Written Works
Quarter 1 performance task Week 8 Performance Tasks

Weights are 20 / 50 / 30 under DO No. 015, s. 2026 — see class-record.html, which carries the transmutation year switch.

The item that reads

On the weekly check, item 7:

A couple are both Tt. They have four children and all four show the recessive trait. Has something gone wrong with the genetics? Explain using the word chance.

Items 1 to 6 are mechanical and are answerable from the wall chart.

What the learner wrote What it means
No — each child had an independent 1 in 4 chance; four in a row is unlikely but possible Full understanding
No, with no explanation Half. The competency is a prediction, and a prediction needs a reason
Yes, something must be wrong The diagnostic answer. The ratio is being read as a quota, and it is the most common misunderstanding of this competency at any age
The parents must not really be Tt Interesting, and wrong for a good reason — worth answering in front of the class

IV — WAYS FORWARD

Remediation

For learners filling squares mechanically by Day 3.

worksheet-remediation.html starts with two coins and does not reach a grid until task 3. Its task 2 — list every way each result can happen — is the one that does the work, because a learner who can say why Tt appears twice will never write 1 : 1 : 1 : 1.

For learners still saying the fourth child is more likely on Day 5.

Do not repeat the explanation. Have them flip a coin four times, ten times over, and count how often four heads come up. It happens, and seeing it happen once ends the argument in a way that no sentence does.

Enrichment

For learners who finish Day 2 early.

A three-generation pedigree with one carrier in it. Given only who shows the trait and who does not, work out who must have been Tt. That is the competency running backwards, and it is what a genetic counsellor actually does.

For learners who have the whole idea by Day 3.

Two traits at once — a 4 × 4 square, sixteen cells, and a 9 : 3 : 3 : 1 ratio. It is beyond the Grade 8 competency and it follows from it with no new ideas at all, which makes it the right extension: more work, not different work.

Teacher reflection

Answer at the end of Friday:

  1. Write down the class vote on Day 1's four-seed question and the class's pooled coin result on Day 3. Those two numbers are the week. If the vote did not move, the coins were watched rather than run.
  2. How many exit tickets across the week used the word chance correctly? Not probably — the specific word, meaning a number attached to a single event.
  3. Did anybody ask whether real families match the ratio? They do not, individually, and the question is a good one. It leads directly to why plant breeders work with thousands of seeds.

Next week

Week 5 leaves heredity for classification — six kingdoms, three domains, and why humans sit where they do. It does not depend on this week.

Week 8's performance task does not either. So this week has no downstream rescue point inside the quarter, and the place it returns is Grade 9 Quarter 3, where DNA, genes and chromosomes assume the square is understood.

If the class does not have it, the cheapest fix is thirty seconds a day for the rest of the quarter: one cross on the board at the start of each lesson, both ratios called out, and one question about a single family. It costs nothing and it is the only thing that reliably works.

Part of the E-turo MATATAG artifact set. Companion files: syllabus.md · lesson-plan.md · assessment.md · offline-activities.md