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In: Biology
Bring four transparent sheets of plastic (like plastic folders). Two are just colorless and two are any other strong color (like dark blue or green). Say your mom has two of them and your dad another two. The colored sheets are dominant alleles and the colorless are recessive. Put each person’s pair of sheets together (on top of one another), then explain how if you have at least one colorful sheet, you get a colored end result, only way to get no color is by having two colorless. This is not an ideal analogy as it probably explains incomplete dominance better lol but they won’t need to know that.
Edit: actually.. Use two transparent sheets of any color and two opaque. That’s probably a more accurate representation.
Your genes are a scrambled mix-up of your mom’s genes and your dad’s genes. Sometimes, you’ll get two genes that are exactly the same — like maybe both your parents give you the same genes for your skin color, or the same genes for your ear shape. But what happens if the genes from your parents are DIFFERENT? Then your body still keeps both genes, but the Dominant one is the one that your body shows the world. But when you grow up and have kids, your Recessive gene is still hiding in your body, and there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll pass on the Recessive gene to your kids.
Use markers. Dark colors for dominant traits, light colors for recessive traits.
If you have two recessive traits then the color stays light, but one darker trait and it will override the color mix, making it darker.
(Depends how technical you want to be about the odds, one major issue with these presentations is that you don’t want kids to go home thinking they are adopted cause their hair/eyes are different colors than their parents.)
I used punnett squares and asked kids what colour their parents hair was. Dominant colours were worth more points so 5 points beat 1 point and that’s why Jimmy has black hair like his father not red like his mother.
You might want to look into wizard/muggle genes in Harry Potter. No idea if kids these days are still into harry potter, but if they are, this could be a good way to keep their interest while you’re explaining. Rowling made it so that being a wizard is autosomal dominant (which means technically being a wizard should be as common as having brown eyes but hey ho) using the most simplistic description of genetics available, the one you learn in… I would assume secondary school but I can’t remember.
Get a bag with large balls and small balls. the large balls are dominant traits the small balls are recessive, put more big balls then small, when you reach in and pull one out it will likely be the big ball but is possible for the small ball to come out too
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