Are you teaching inheritance or inherited traits in science and looking for fun ideas to add to your lesson? This area of science is a fundamental building block for understanding other areas including genetics, natural selection, evolution, and more.
In this blog post, I’ve outlined 5 ways that you can engage your students with this subject (in particular for third grade or UK Key Stage 2) – I hope it gives you some fun ideas for teaching inherited traits.
When is inheritance taught in primary/elementary school?
UK science curriculum: KS2 (year 6) Evolution and Inheritance
‘Recognise that living things produce offspring of the same kind, but normally offspring vary and are not identical to their parents.’
US NGSS: 3-LS3-1
‘Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence that plants and animals have traits inherited from parents and that variation of these traits exists in a group of similar organisms. Patterns are the similarities and differences in traits shared between offspring and their parents, or among siblings’.
What is an inherited trait?
An inherited trait is a characteristic or feature that is passed down from parents to their offspring through their genes. These traits can be physical, such as eye color, hair color, and height, or they can be behavioral, such as the ability to roll your tongue.
What are some fun ways to teach inherited traits to children?
1. Celebrity families
Children will love trying to match pictures of celebrities to their children. For each pair they make, they’ll need to justify their decision by outlining the inherited traits that they observe.
Choose examples where there are clear similarities so it’s not too difficult!
Some examples:
- Reese Witherspoon and Ava Phillippe
- Victoria and Romeo Beckham
- Paul and Jack Sullivan Rudd
- Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer
You could use this activity to address the common misconception that females pass on traits to their daughters and males to their sons.
An alternative version
You could also do the pairs activity with photos of people you know, or even have children bring in photos of their parents if appropriate.
I asked friends and family to provide me with digital photos of their similar-looking parent/child/grandchild for a professional development training course. I put the photos on the screen and the teachers on the course worked out who was related to who by looking for shared features. It was a lot of fun!
2. Three-eyed monster activity
Explore inherited traits with the 3-eyed monsters! This science lesson is interactive and allows students to learn about inheritance by observing the physical features of some little monsters, and predicting what their offspring might look like.
They will choose 2 monsters from the set to be the parents, and then draw an offspring.
The lesson is accompanied by a colourful presentation to help you introduce both inherited and acquired traits to your class before they complete the activity.
You could create a similar lesson using characters from the Mr Men and Little Miss books.
3. Sorting inherited and acquired traits
Download a free worksheet (PDF) to help students get to grips with which traits are inherited and which are acquired. With this cut-and-paste activity, they’ll look at and sort 10 different traits.
There’s an opportunity for extra discussion as one of the inherited traits (curly hair) is also something that could be acquired.
4. Class investigation – looking for common traits
Collect some data about the observable inherited traits in your classroom to see which are most common. Here are some you could look at;
- Ability to roll tongue
- Widow’s peak or straight hairline
- Eye color
- Hair color
- Cheek dimples
- Ear lobe attachment
- Left/right-handedness
- Hair texture
Use the data collected to create tables or graphs – a great cross-curricular link to mathematics!
5. Explore breeds of dog
Play a game where you show children pictures of different breeds of dog. They write down on paper what a puppy from 2 of the dogs would look like. Children can then read out the description to see if others can guess who the parents of the offspring are!
They can also try drawing some different cross-breed offspring based on the traits of the parents, and research some of the (sometimes comical) names for them.
If children have a mixed-breed dog as a pet, they could bring in a photo to share with the class. Children can observe the features and think about which traits are inherited.
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