Description
What our Human Reproduction lesson plan includes
Lesson Overview and Objectives: Human Reproduction teaches students about sexual reproduction of humans and what it means. Students will be able to define certain terms and explain how the process works. This lesson is for students in 5th grade and 6th grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the yellow box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.
Options for Lesson
On the classroom procedure page, you will find several suggestions in the “Options for Lesson” section for additional ideas or alternatives for the lesson. One suggestion is to have students vote on each others’ skits according to various categories, such as best skit, most creative, and funniest. Another idea is to have students sketch an image related to the six steps of human reproduction as an additional activity. You could also discuss the concept of twins, triplets, and so on as part of the lesson. Another option is to invite an obstetrician to speak with the class and answer their questions. One last idea is to assign one of the terms from the content pages to pairs of students and have them research it further either online or with other resources.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page adds a paragraph of extra information or guidance to help you as you administer the lesson plan to your students. It reminds you that you need to ensure your school or district allows a discussion on this topic before presenting it to your class. Use the blank lines on the page to write down any other thoughts or ideas you have for the lesson.
HUMAN REPRODUCTION LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Asexual Reproduction
The Human Reproduction lesson plan contains four pages of content. The first page defines reproduction and discusses asexual reproduction and some of the living things that use this process. All living things have to reproduce or else they will die out, whether they be plants or animals or anything else that lives. There are two types of reproduction: asexual and sexual.
Asexual reproduction allows an organism to reproduce without the involvement of another organism. This means that an organism can create a genetically identical copy of itself by itself. The offspring of these organisms will look exactly like the parent organism. Examples include bacteria, plants cells in a tree root, skin cells, and lizards’ tails that grow back after they lose them.
The lesson includes a diagram that shows this process from parent cell, to the division of the nucleus, to the division of the cytoplasm, and to the two new daughter cells. There is only one parent because a second parent (or organism) is unnecessary for asexual reproduction. The one parent ends up producing two new cells that look just like the parent cell.
Sexual Reproduction
Students will then learn what sexual reproduction involves. This process requires two parents instead of one. Both parents must be the same type of organism (specialized), meaning that they must both be humans, or fish, or rhinos, and so on. The process requires the sexual interaction between the parents to create the offspring by combining the genetic material of the two during the cell division process of meiosis.
Examples of living things that undergo this process, besides humans, are chickens, butterflies, sunflowers, roses, and many other types of plants and animals. A parent cell divides during asexual reproduction, but in sexual reproduction, a special cell from each of the two parents join together, grow, and then divide to create offspring. The offspring do not look exactly like the parent. Instead, they contain features of both parents.
Human Reproduction Steps
The next part of the lesson details how exactly this process works with regard to humans. Like any other animal that undergoes sexual reproduction, a male and female human must engage sexually to begin the process of producing offspring. The lesson outlines six specific steps required for the process of reproduction to occur successfully.
First, a human must reach puberty, which is the time when the body begins to change and become more mature. At this point, a person can produce special cells specifically for this process. Second, a man and woman must engage sexually so that the sperm that the man produces can seek to enter the egg that the woman produces. Third, one (and only one!) of the sperm can fertilize the egg cell.
Fourth, the new human begins to grow and develop inside the woman’s stomach, beginning a nine-month term of pregnancy. The fifth step describes the process of the baby’s development. It is a zygote on day one, an embryo for the first two months, and finally a fetus from that point on to birth. The baby grows and receives nutrients from the mother throughout this time. Finally, after around nine months, the mother gives birth to the baby.
Key Terms
Here is a list of the vocabulary words students will learn during this lesson:
- Reproduction: the biological process by which organisms produce new individual organisms
- Asexual reproduction: a type of reproduction that allows an organism to reproduce without the involvement of another organism
- Sexual reproduction: a type of reproduction that requires the sexual interaction of two specialized organisms to create a new organism
- Meiosis: a specialized type of cell division in which the genetic material of two organisms combines
- Puberty: the time when bodies begin to change and become more mature
- Sperm: the male sex cell
- Egg: the female sex cell
- Chromosome: the instructions for a new organism
- Fertilize: the process by which a sperm cell attaches to an egg cell to begin the development of offspring
- Pregnancy: a period of time following fertilization in which offspring beings to grow and develop inside the female body
- Zygote: the term to describe a one-day-old baby
- Embryo: the term to describe a baby during the first two months of pregnancy
- Fetus: the term to describe a baby from the third month of pregnancy to its birth
HUMAN REPRODUCTION LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Human Reproduction lesson plan contains three different worksheets: an activity, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. Each one will help students solidify their understanding of the material from the lesson. Use the guidelines on the classroom procedure page to know when to hand out each worksheet to the students throughout the lesson.
REPRODUCTION SKIT ACTIVITY
Students will work with a partner for the activity. The worksheet instructs students to write a two-person skit in which one person plays the role of a female egg cell, and the other a male sperm cell. The page provides a short example of what the dialogue might look like. The skits can be humorous, serious, or both. Regardless of tone, students must ensure the facts they include are correct and the skit is appropriate. They should be creative and use their imaginations to think outside the box and they come up with the dialogue for their skits. When they finish, they will perform their skits in front of the class. You can use the rubric at the bottom of the worksheet to grade the students’ skits during or at the end of their performances.
DEFINITIONS AND FACTS PRACTICE WORKSHEET
There are two sections on the practice worksheet. The first section requires students to match definitions to the correct terms. There are 13 definitions and terms in the word bank. For the second section, students will read seven facts. They must decide whether each fact refers to asexual (A) or sexual (S) reproduction.
HUMAN REPRODUCTION HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
Similar to the practice worksheet, the homework assignment consists of two sections. For the first section, students must answer 10 questions using the knowledge they learned from the lesson. The second section requires students to place the 10 steps of human reproduction in correct chronological order.
Worksheet Answer Keys
The final pages of the document are answer keys for the practice and homework worksheets. The answers for both worksheets are in red. Students’ responses should mirror those of the answer keys for all the sections since all the questions have a single right answer. There may be some variation to how students answer certain questions on the homework assignment, but the general answers should reflect those on the answer key. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
