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.
Laying down the plastic using a tractor. The mechanism simultaneously lays down a drip line beneath the plastic for watering.
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.
Punching holes in the plastic.
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.
A green lynx spider from near the Heifer global village’s refugee camp.A brown spider found in the brush on the dam.A wolf spider with babies on its back. Found in the grass near the foot of the dam.Yellow garden spider found in the herb garden.
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.
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.
Rotifers under the microscope.
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).
Reference table of equations for motion, force, work and power.
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.
Today we reconstituted our small groups for science. One student was late getting their name into the bowl so did not get randomly assigned to a group, so I deviated a little from our standard procedure and asked him which group he thought would be the best for him. Not which group he most wanted to be in, but which group he could be most effective — and learn the most — in. But, as a means of following up on all of our discussion at Heifer about what makes a community, before I gave him the chance to answer I asked the entire class to identify what qualities they thought they brought to their groups, and then, separately, I asked them what qualities the would like their teammates to have.
Figure 1. Qualities students would like to see in other people in their science working groups.
I got a number of interesting answers to the question about what they thought their qualities were. I know how hard it is to self-assess sometimes so I required that they could only put positive qualities, and allowed them to ask their peers for an external perspective.
My favorite response was from one girl who asked her friend sitting next to her what her positive qualities were, and the friend responded, “bossiness”. She thought about that for a second, then nodded and said, “that sounds about right.” When I asked them both why they thought “bossiness” was a positive quality they explained that the one girl was good at taking charge when necessary, and telling everyone what to do. I couldn’t argue with that description, because I’d observed it in their previous group work. The key part though was the “when necessary”, because while she does take charge, she’s very good at managing her group: giving everyone the opportunity for input while still being decisive. Instead of bossiness, I’d probably have used the term “leadership”.
After they had the time to compile their list of qualities they wanted to see in teammates, we compiled a list on the whiteboard (see Figure 1). Perhaps it’s just that they know what I want to hear, but it was quite nice to see that the top two characteristics were:
focused, and
hardworking.
“Smart” and “fun” were the next most popular on the list, but after some discussion I/we decided to drop the “smart” since their criteria for smart was just having a basic level of intellectual competence, and it was somewhat less important than the other major qualities listed.
Of the remaining three major qualities that they’d like to see in teammates — focused, hardworking, and fun — I asked them each to pick the one they were going to focus on developing over the next month of group work. I asked a couple of the students who chose “fun” to reconsider since it was already one of their current areas of strength.
I then let them pick a second quality to work on from the full list, and had them write their two chosen qualities down somewhere prominent, because we’ll be checking in with them regularly over the course of the next month to see what specific things they’re doing to work on them, and how their efforts are going.
Then I let the student choose his group.
The discussion took the entire class period, and we did not get much “science” done, but if it can get students to be a bit more focused on their work it would be well worth the time.
