June 14th, 2013 Namrataa Shah 88 Fairwood Circle Brampton, ON L6R 0X2 Dear Ms.

Kaloshi, It has been a wonderful experience being a part of your grade 11 biology class. I have successfully learned many new ideas and concepts along with building onto previous knowledge, throughout the course, starting from the biodiversity unit until the internal organs unit. The first unit that was covered in the course was the biodiversity unit. In this unit we focused on how diversity amongst us, how we classify and name species, and the 7 kingdoms and plants. During the second unit, genetics, we talked about how offspring is produced, how the traits of the offspring are selected, the genotypes and phenotypes of an individual and some disorders that are a result of errors meiosis. Next we covered the evolution unit in which we focused on how species evolved, constructing phylogeny trees, and the discoveries many scientist made that led to the evolutionary background we have today. The course finished off with the ISU unit, internal organs, in which we mainly concentrated on how the human body functions. We talked about how the different systems such as the respiratory, circulatory and digestive system works. Overall, this course enhanced my understanding of how diverse earth is and the fact that the presence of all species and organisms is important to keep this world diverse and sustainable. This course was fairly relevant to the Health Care profession since it gave the basics of how humans evolved, how humans and every other species get the specific genotypes they have and how the human body functions. The Health Care profession focuses on treating and nursing for humans. This was relevant to the internal organs unit along with some of the genetics unit content, but however, was very brief. However, this course gave a taste many career options such as Marine biologist, Microbiologist, Genetic Counsellor, Forensic Scientist, Anthropologist, Curator and many others. This course has not only given me knowledge about the basics of biology, but however, has helped me build upon many learning strategies. As many of the grade 11 biology students have experienced the work load of the day to day homework we get in the course. At the beginning of the semester, I wanted to see myself mange my time wisely, so that I can finish all the important work to perfection. Through this course, I have learned that, there will be a lot of work, but however, it is not necessary to do every single question of the homework and as long as you understand the concept that was taught, you will do well. I have also learned that memorization is not the key however, understanding is. This is because when you understand something, you will remember it for the rest of your life, but when you memorize something, you will forget over a period of time. Understanding concepts will aid your understanding of the higher level contents that will be taught in the future. To add on, this course has greatly improved my lab report skills. Looking back at all my lab marks, I didnt start of very well, but however, I have gradually shown improvement. For example, the first lab, Paper Towel Lab, I got a 73 percent and then the last lab, the Blood Type Lab, I achieved a 98 percent. This portrays my progress for my lab report skills. Overall, this course has given me an opportunity to further establish my learning skills and has trained me for post-secondary education. As mentioned earlier, that this course has been an excellent experience through many ways. Being a student, I enjoyed doing the labs, the assignments, activities and summatives. The

labs gave me hands on experience and allowed me to visually understand the concepts. The same goes for the assignments and activities. The activities I enjoyed the most were: the Diversity Discovery in the biodiversity unit, Baby activity in the genetics unit and the Woolybooger activity during the evolution unit. These activities helped us understand bigger concepts on smaller scales. There may have been many activities, labs and summatives that I enjoyed, but the fact that all these activities, labs and summatives where extremely close together, if not overlapping, put us at a disadvantage of performing our best on every single one of them. Pursuing this further, the portfolio was an interesting task. It was fun yet, a time consuming task. I enjoyed doing everything, but the articles and concept map not that fun. Overall, if the work load is reduced and more hands on work is given, I believe that this course will be even more fun and pleasant. Thank you for being a wonderful teacher and hope to see you next

Sincerely,

Namrataa Shah