Julia DeFelice's Biology Blog

In this lesson, students will be gaining knowledge about how to regulate homeostasis. We will learn what homeostasis is and the feedback mechanisms that help us reach it. As before, my goal for this lesson is to lecture less and get the students involved more. I hope to do this by having students model different types of negative and positive feedback in the classroom. HS-LS1-3. Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence that feedback mechanisms maintain homeostasis.   TIMELINE OF ACTIVITIES Before class begins, I will put a fan in the classroom in order to get the room temperature down. The hope is that students will get goosebumps and I can ask them about how this relates to negative feedback. The class will start with a 2 minute 30 second video from YouTube that goes through the basic concepts of homeostasis. It discusses what it is, why it is important to our body function, and the different feedback loops that our body takes to regulate itself. This video will serv...

Hi everyone! My name is Julia DeFelice and I am a graduate student at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education. I recently graduated from Union College, receiving my BS in Biology with a minor in psychology. I am currently a student teacher in Massapequa High School’s Ames Campus, which is an exclusively 9th grade school. I love my cooperating teacher and he has really given me a lot of great ideas on how to handle different kinds of material!   In this lesson (which will probably take 1.5 days to complete), students will become familiar with what makes something alive and how that thing that makes us alive (cells) have different functions to keep us alive. My goal for this lesson is to try and stay away from lecturing as much as I can. I will try and achieve this by providing brief definitions of what makes someone alive and the function of each organelle within plant and animal cells in order to give students a background to approach the activities.   MS-LS1-1. Plan and conduc...