Right, I have a 40 minute lessons (i might be able to stretch it to 2 40 min lessons)to teach my year 11 students evolution. A fair few of my boys have speaking and language difficulties. I work in a special school. This will be part of their GCSE Science. It needs to be simple, include natural selection, variation, Lamarck, Darwin and extinction. Basic is the key. I'm the teaching assistant but the teacher has asked me if I'd like to plan and lead the lesson as I probably know more than her on the subject and its one of my passions. Any ideas welcome!

Jain x x

The following:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhHOjC4oxh8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SCjhI86grU

About 15 minutes, but covers some very basics.

I wouldn't know how to plan a lesson for someone else, but all I could suggest is that doing stuff is more interesting than listening to stuff.

Conceiving of a way to 'show' how change accrues over time would be more stimulating - even better would be to have them doing something that showed this.

Perhaps - and this is just as a suggestion as it would require quite some work on your part, you could find a series of photos of skulls showing the evolution of, say, horses, whales, cats and humans, or other well documented fossil records, and then mix them all up. Have as many complete piles as desired small groups, split them into groups and have them try to match up the correct groups of species together. This will be extremely easy - and that's part of the point.

Get them to explain how they did it - have some of the labels for various distinctive parts of skull morphology ready to help them talk about it - i.e. temporal bone, mandible etc so they can say 'the mandible's bigger' or whatever.

Then once achieved try to see if they can determine a chronological order. This will be considerably harder in some cases, but they should get some of it right. Much congratulations - they're anatomists!

Again, try to draw out their reasoning for their ordering - it doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong here. Then ask what it means for a species to change over time and bob's your uncle, you can go onto the history of human attempts to explain diversity.

What this is showing is one way by which the notion of evolution can be alighted on - by the tracks of descent through anatomy.

It's a rough idea, but something like it should produce a lot of questions and interest.

You could also give them some games to play with to reinforce the basic ideas, eg:-

http://www.freeworldgroup.com/games9/ga ... lator2.htm