Lesson Plan: Mendel's Experiments Science
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to describe the experiments that Gregor Mendel performed on his pea plants and explain how his discoveries led to him writing his laws of inheritance.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- describe how Mendel used cross- and self-pollination to produce first generation and second generation pea plants,
- explain that Mendel chose pea plants for his experiments because they were easily grown, could be cross-, self-, and artificially pollinated, and had obviously contrasting traits,
- outline how Mendel’s experiments showed there were dominant traits and recessive traits in pea plants,
- identify the laws that Mendel wrote following his experiments as the law of dominance, the law of independent assortment, and the law of segregation,
- use genetic crosses and diagrams to determine dominant and recessive traits and simple phenotypic ratios.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- the fact that plants are multicellular organisms that can reproduce,
- the fact that traits are inherited by offspring from their parents.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- the detailed process of cross- or self-pollination.