Genetic Disorder Poster: SCI 10M

During Science, our class has been working on a topic called Genetics and Evolution- as part of this unit we are required to research a type of genetic disorder/disease/condition and present it in a poster format. This will then account for 50% of our overall mark for this topic. The reason for this is because we have been doing student oriented learning system- this is where the members of the class get to design how we are going to learn. Most of us liked the idea of creating something visual to represent our work, so we compiled our work into a poster. Another factor that influenced our poster making was the feedback Matua Ihaka had received from the class- a large amount of us disagreed with having our entire grade based on the results in our tests, as most of did relatively well throughout the unit, but might not do so well in the test. Anyway, this is the poster I created on Albinism. 

Science: Food and Digestion

During science for the past few weeks, we have been studying food and digestion, and have recently been looking at teeth,  comparing carnivore teeth to herbivores. We learnt how the different diet of that particular animal affects the tools they have to break the food down. For example, the teeth cows possess  grind down their food are predominantly premolars and molars, as those teeth offer a wider and flatter surface area for them to use to break down the fibre rich grass which their diet predominantly consists of. Carnivores on the other hand, possess sharper and more prominent incisors which are used for cutting into their food, as well as canines, four large teeth situated near the front of the mouth which are used for holding and securing their prey to prevent it from escaping. These teeth are also responsible for tearing the food into smaller chunks, making it easier for the incisors and other teeth to chew. We also looked into the different ways these groups of animals have of chewing their food. Cows have a jaw that enables them to move their mouth in a circular motion, and this makes it easier for them to grind the food over their teeth. Carnivores on the other hand, possess a jaw that moves up and down, and this gives them a much stronger bite power. Their jaw is able to move upwards with the help of strong temporalis muscles that pull their jaw upward and backwards into their skull. That kind of went of the point, so to cut a long story short, below is a video that we made. We had to look at the teeth the different skulls had and then had to guess what it was and then answer a few more questions in the video (which is below). 

Nau mai, haere mai ki tēnei taonga

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