Grade 6 · Science · Lesson 23

Inheritance and Simple Genetics

Look around at a family. A child might have her mother\'s eyes, her father\'s smile, and her grandmother\'s curly hair. None of that is an accident. Living things pass instructions from one generation to the next, and those instructions decide a lot of what an organism looks like and how its body works. The study of how traits move from parents to offspring is called GENETICS.

What this lesson teaches

1Explain that traits are passed from parents to offspring through genes
2Describe the difference between dominant and recessive alleles
3Distinguish between inherited traits and acquired traits
4Use simple examples to predict how a trait might be passed on

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