Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
As an introduction to ionic compounds, my chemistry students hooked up a dime to an electrode in a copper chloride solution. It’s not exactly copper plating, but the color is quite interesting.
It was also interesting to see how the color of the copper chloride solution changed as well: from a dark to pale blueish green as the copper was extracted by the electrolysis.
One of the jobs my class helped with at the Heifer Ranch was planting garlic in the Heifer CSA garden. The gardeners had laid rows and rows of this black plastic mulch to keep down the weeds, protect the soil, and help keep the ground warm over the winter.
We then used an improvised puncher to put holes in the plastic through which we could plant cloves of garlic pointy side up. The puncher was a simple flat piece of plywood, about one foot by three feet in dimensions, with a set of bolts drilled through. The bolts extended a few inches below the board and would be pressed through the black plastic. Two handles on each side of the board made it easier for two people to maneuver and punch row after row of holes.
As I took my turn punching holes, we did the math to figure out just how much garlic we were planting. A quick count of the last imprint of the puncher showed about 15 holes per punch. Each row was about 200 feet long, which made for approximately 3,000 heads of garlic per row.
We managed to plant one and a half rows. That meant about 4,500 garlic cloves. With ten people planting, that meant each person planted about 450 cloves. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.
The Heifer Ranch is home to quite the variety of large spiders, including the tarantulas we found a couple years ago. Most of them work hard at keeping the insect pests down. Here’s a collection of some of them we ran into this year.
Ms. Mertz believes she found some feline tracks in the soft sediment next to the puddles in the creek that may belong to a bobcat. Or maybe a large housecat. Unlike canine tracks — like dogs and coyotes — felines don’t leave claw marks in their tracks.
The Michigan DNR has a nice comparison of bobcat to other tracks, while the Missouri Dept. of Conservation has a nice reference of common animal tracks for the state.
Two students working on their campus ecology project were using the compound microscope to look at microbes associated with the leaf matter from the creek, and they found these two rotifers.
The one on the left was trying to suck in the two green protists, which generated a current that sent the protists into a circular loop.
The puddles along the creek’s bed are getting smaller and smaller. Last week, Ms. Mertz’s class was out doing their ecological survey of the creek life lead by Ms. Currier. They still found lots of arthropods, frogs and some fish concentrated around the remaining puddles.
To summarize what we’ve been doing this past quarter in Middle School Science, we’ve compiled this handy little reference table of the equations for motion (mechanics).
The Mars Society is sponsoring a Youth Rover Challenge using Lego Robotics kits similar to the ones we’re using for our robotics program. It’s relatively cheap to participate, so it might make for a good initial foray for my students.
↬ Mr. Deitrich.