Inherited traits activities

Check out these five engaging activities to ensure your kiddos will have a blast exploring the differences between inherited traits and learned behaviors!

Science is for Kids offers STEM and science resources for the elementary classroom. Check out our blog page for lessons and activities.

So we just finished a chapter in Science and that means it was time for a lab or experiment. The last lesson we hit was on Genetics...which can be super tough for 5th! Explaining the concept and having the students truly understand was tricky. We started out by watching the free Brainpop video on traits and heredity (its even one of their FREE ones) that reinforced our concepts and vocab from the book. I sometimes do these videos first to introduce a topic or do them after as a review and…

Assignment for gr 3's to take home to discuss with their parents. Since our traits are inherited from our parents have your students explore what genes they have received from their mom and dad. An interesting exercise for your science unit on heredity and traits.

Download a free worksheet (PDF) to help students get to grips with which traits are inherited and which are acquired. With this cut-and-paste activity, they’ll look at and sort 10 different traits. You'll find the link to the download under number 3 on the blog post. Read the rest of the blog post for other ideas for teaching inherited traits and characteristics in science.

Engaging inherited traits activities, lessons and experiments to teach inheritance and variation of traits in third grade science.

Check out this hands on art activity that helps your students explore and understand inherited traits.

Fun 3rd grade activity. Are these things handed down to you through your genes are have you acquired them? Can you blame your parents for your freckles and how short you are?

Engaging lessons, activities, and videos to teach students in third grade all about inherited traits and heredity. Explore how animals and plants pass traits from parent to offspring with these engaging ideas!

One of the best parts of this activity is seeing the many different monsters that are drawn by students and discussing how despite having the same set of traits (same mom and dad) they each ended up with a different set of traits. We talk a lot about how we look similar to our parents but not exactly like them. We also talk about how our siblings are not exactly like us physically.