teaching tangents
and I don't mean lines that touch circles at a single point, either!
My grade eleven biology class started a unit on biodiversity this week. We generally start off with classification, the six kingdoms, the levels of taxonomy, and dichotomous keys before spending a bit of time on characteristics of representative organisms from the kingdoms.
Yesterday, as part of an activity where students were identifying "aliens" using a dichotomous key, we somehow started talking about Harry Potter.
Each "alien" was identified using a made-up scientific name. Just like real scientific names, for example, Felis domesticus, which are based on Latin, the fake names were Latin-sounding, such as Broadus tritops. As one of my students was working through the activity, she remarked that the names sounded like the things you'd hear Harry Potter say.
So... never one to miss an opportunity to discuss HP's magical world (no, ataea, I didn't bring up Severus Snape in this discussion) I explained that since organisms' scientific names were based on Latin, and Harry Potter's spells were also somewhat Latin-ish, it made sense that they sounded similar.
My grade eleven biology class started a unit on biodiversity this week. We generally start off with classification, the six kingdoms, the levels of taxonomy, and dichotomous keys before spending a bit of time on characteristics of representative organisms from the kingdoms.
Yesterday, as part of an activity where students were identifying "aliens" using a dichotomous key, we somehow started talking about Harry Potter.
Each "alien" was identified using a made-up scientific name. Just like real scientific names, for example, Felis domesticus, which are based on Latin, the fake names were Latin-sounding, such as Broadus tritops. As one of my students was working through the activity, she remarked that the names sounded like the things you'd hear Harry Potter say.
So... never one to miss an opportunity to discuss HP's magical world (no, ataea, I didn't bring up Severus Snape in this discussion) I explained that since organisms' scientific names were based on Latin, and Harry Potter's spells were also somewhat Latin-ish, it made sense that they sounded similar.