Hands-on Activities for Teaching Biology to High School and Middle School Students

The expression "hands-on, minds-on" summarizes the philosophy we have incorporated in these activities – namely, that students will learn best if they are actively engaged and if their activities are closely linked to understanding important biological concepts. To enhance student learning and understanding, many of our activities provide a learning sequence which includes multiple discussion and analysis questions and one or more hands-on investigations.

Many of our activities are explicitly aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, as indicated by (NGSS) in the descriptions. These activities foster student understanding of Disciplinary Core Ideas, engage students in Scientific Practices, provide the opportunity to discuss Crosscutting Concepts, and prepare students to meet the Performance Expectations of the Next Generation Science Standards. Additional information is provided in Summary Tables and in the Teacher Preparation Notes for these activities.

To accommodate limited budgets, most of our activities can be carried out with minimum equipment and expense for supplies.

Additional resources for teaching biology are available at Minds-on Activities for Teaching Biology.  These teaching resources include analysis and discussion activities, games, and overviews of important biological topics, including major concepts, common misconceptions, and suggested learning activities.

We encourage you to use our Word files to modify the Student Handouts to optimize learning for your students. The Teacher Preparation Notes for each activity provide learning goals, suggestions for implementation (including recommended prior knowledge and needed supplies and equipment), relevant biology background, and suggested online resources (including videos and follow-up or related activities).

We often revise our activities to improve student learning, based on our teaching experience and suggestions from the middle school and high school teachers we work with and other users of this website. If an activity is new or has been significantly improved within the last few years, the name of the activity is followed by the date of the current version. We encourage you to subscribe to our listserv to receive notices when we post new activities or significantly improved versions of current activities. 

We invite you to use the Comments link below for general comments or the comments links for each activity to add your suggestions, questions or comments. If you prefer, you can send a private message to iwaldron@sas.upenn.edu.

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