July 22

The Pumpkin Plants Are Flowering

Here’s a quick update on the pumpkin patch at our school.  I checked the plants out yesterday and noticed a few things.  First, The plants have all grown.  Also, they seem to be more green.  Some of the leaves in the past weeks have been yellow.  I think they might have been watered too much.  I altered this a bit for both gardens.  Hopefully, that helped.  I still see some yellow discoloration in the leaf of some of the plants, but not much.  I have not seen as many leaves being eaten.  I put some slug bait down last week and that seemed to keep the slimy guys off for now.  Here’s a photo of one such creature I caught in our garden.

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This is a banana slug. It’s a native species for our state.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new pest arrived this week and has been munching little holes in the leaves of the plants. Here’s a photo of a beetle I found on one of the leaves.  I’m not sure if it’s the culprit. Again, I’ll keep an eye on it.

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I found that the growth is still better in Garden 1 compared to Garden 2.  If you look carefully in the Garden 1 photo you can see some yellow coloring.  Those are the flowers that are starting to bloom.  Remember that the pumpkin fruit start as a flower.  Once it gets pollinated it will start to make the pumpkin fruit.  Do you recall how they get pollinated?  See the photos below.

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Garden 1

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Garden 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lastly, I observes some interesting color on the leaves of one of the pumpkins in the 5 gallon buckets.  I’m not sure what it is exactly.  It might be nothing, or it could be the start of some sort of disease.  I’ll check back on it next week.

The courtyard to the school is generally closed during the month of July, but it might start opening up in August.  Stop by and check if you have time to see how the plants are progressing in person.

June 30

Sprouts and Vines

Well the irrigation has been installed and is hopefully keeping the pumpkins well hydrated. I guess the technical term is irrigated. We now have many plants coming up and adding more leaves to their stems. There was a distinct difference between the 2 gardens with germination.  Garden 1 had 29 of 32 seeds germinate, while Garden 2 had 21 of 33 seeds germinate.  Many students predicted that the sunlight was the key factor in germination rate.  What other factors could have played a role?

We may need to thin some soon. The teachers are checking in once in a while to make sure everything is growing well during the summer months.

Waiting for germination.

Waiting for germination.

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The first plant to germinate.

5th graders finished up the year well.  We worked hard to create a legacy crop that will be growing at the beginning of your 6th grade year.  Be sure to stop by to see how your hard work is paying off. Hopefully we have enough fruit to harvest for our 1st graders.

April 2

Fish Club

In March students started Fish Club. It’s a club that involves students managing a system and learning more about Environments. This particular environment is a freshwater aquatic environment. The class is learning to manage the different variables of this complicated system in order to keep our fish alive. Our aquarium is an 80 gallon rectangular prism.

Golden Mystery Snail

In the last week we’ve hit a couple of obstacles that may prevent us from keeping our fish healthy. The Fish Club team noticed our nitrate and ammonia levels were rising. Also, Fish Club has spotted at least 2 fish with Ich. So, we’ve had to do some research. What are nitrates? How do they form? How do we get rid of them? What’s Ich? How do we get rid of it? To help our class connect the dots I’ve created some links with some information that should help us understand the answers to these questions better.

Nitrogen Cycle (Note: The graphic on this page helps us understand the Nitrogen Cycle in a simple way from the fish’s perspective.)

Ich-Ichthyophthirius multifiliis

We’ve started to test the water weekly to manage the aquarium system and basically keep an eye on things. Our general observation is that our water quality has varied quite a bit. For instance, the nitrates have been between 40-80 ppm. We have decided to run an experiment in an attempt to improve it. I’ve presented a question to the class…What might stabilize our aquarium water quality? Some of the students had the idea of changing the water? I asked, “How often?” We discussed it further and decided that we will change the water 2 times each week and conduct a 20% water change each time. This might help us keep the toxins built up in the aquarium out. Our experiment will be a controlled experiment. In other words, the only change that will be made to the system will be a water change. The class will follow a specific procedure. We will try and build it on Monday when everyone returns from break. Hopefully our fish will be alive when we return. If you think you know how the toxins were able to find there way into our tank, I’d love to hear from you. Why have the ammonia and nitrate levels increased?

 

 

October 28

Farmer John

Recently my friend, Farmer John, called me. We were talking about his farm and he explained to me that his irrigation system for his farm was recently shutdown due to a problem with the freshwater source. Farmer John explained that he would not be able to use the stream water he had been relying on due to low water volumes from the dry summer. He said he could only take some water from the stream as other wildlife like salmon depended on it to swim to their spawning grounds. Farmer John said the state is only allowing him to capture a small amount of water. He’s worried about the crops he’s planted. However, I told him why not use some of the saltwater from the ocean nearby. I said, “You could mix it with the freshwater you’re allowed to harvest and conserve your freshwater and grow your crops!” I told him we’ve been experimenting with different levels of salinity. We could study the problem and share our findings. I said, “We’ll find the range of tolerance for the crops.” He said, “That would be great!”

Well, you guys have heard the story. Now, we need to think about the experimental design. What do you think we can set-up to help Farmer John determine how salinity could affect his crops?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What we decided for our experimental design:

    •  Create 4 different saltwater solutions. Label one with 0, another 1, … 2, and 4.
    •  Set-up a tray of crops with 4 different cups. Label one with 0 another 1, … 2, and 4.
    •  In each cup place 4 corn  seeds, 4 pea seeds, 3 barley seeds and 3 radish seeds.
    •  Plant all seeds in the cups with about a cup of soil.
    • Water each cup with 50 ml from the saltwater solution that’s the same as the cup label.
    • Observe what happens.

What do you think will happen?
Farmer John Predictions
October 24

Dear Dr. Brian

10/24/11

Dear Dr. Brian,

We’re writing you to tell you what we have found from our brine shrimp studies. We have enjoyed working with the shrimp. We have some good and bad news for you.

We took some cups with 150 ml of water and placed different amounts of salt in them. We placed a mini scoop of brine shrimp in each cup. Then we observed to see how they would live and grow.

First, the good news is we found that brine shrimp did very well in cups with 2-4 scoops (5ml) of salt per 150ml of water. So, the range of tolerance was 2-4 scoops of salt per 150 ml of water. The optimum, or best, level was 2 scoops of salt per 150ml of water.

The bad news is the cups with 0 scoops of salt and 6 scoops had no brine shrimp eggs hatch. So this means you have a serious problem if the water level goes down and the salinity continues to go up.

One more bit of good news is that eggs that didn’t hatch in cups with 0 and 6 scoops were found to be viable if the salinity was changed. So, maybe it’s not too late to make things better at Mono Lake.

Sincerely,

Mr. Magill and The Portable People

PS What are your thoughts about our viablility findings?

October 17

Letter from Dr. Salina Brian

Here’s the letter I received last year from Dr.Salina Brian that I had mentioned previous to our work with the brine shrimp. Now that we have data for her, how should we present it to her?

9/25/10

Dear Mr. Magill,

As I told you in our conversation on the telephone, I’ve been studying the bird populations around Mono Lake. This is a lake in Northern California. The lake has been drying up and getting smaller. As a result, Mono Lake has become a salt lake. As the level of the lake falls, the concentration of salt, or salinity has increased. This environmental change might be affecting the organisms in the area. For instance, the lake has small organisms called brine shrimp. The birds that migrate to the lake depend on them. If the lake continues to get saltier, either because the lake is drying up or fresh water flowing into the lake is being reduced, the salty aquatic environment might have an effect on the shrimp.

I would be most grateful if your class chose to help me out on a research study. I’m trying to figure out if the salinity is an environmental factor that’s affecting the hatching of Mono Lake brine shrimp eggs. If so, I’ve sent you some brine shrimp eggs from Mono Lake to use for research.

Would your class be able to help to design an experiment that would contribute to my studies?

Sincerely,
Dr. Salina Brian

September 29

Something’s Fishy

This week we learned that BTB can be used to check for acid in water. So, we gathered 4 water samples and tested them. First, I grabbed a sample from a faucet in the school building. The others came from our portable classroom. We took two samples from the water cooler. One from the water cooler itself and the other from the overflow tray. Also, we thought it would be interesting to see if there was acid in our fish tanks we’ve set up around the class. In each sample we found acid, except for the tap water. How did the acid get in the water? The class came up with lots of variables that could have been the cause. These are factors that can change and affect the outcome of an experiment.

fish
fish breathing
temperature
gas
fish waste
food waste
bacteria

The kids decided to run an experiment and to try and change the variable called fish. We placed 3 cups out and filled them with 100 ml of tap water. We knew tap water didn’t have acid in it; so we’ll use it to see what might be linked to the cause of the acid. Next, we put a fish called a guppy in one cup and a plant called elodea in another cup. The 3rd cup just had water. Last we put 6 drops of BTB in each cup to see if it would change its color from blue to yellow, which indicates acid. Nothing happened at first. We decided to wait 30 minutes. Below is a picture of the experimental set-up.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you remember what happened? The cup with the fish changed color. The elodea stayed the same and the cup with nothing stayed the same. So, how did the fish cause the water to change? The video link below reveals what happens.

 

September 19

Aquatic Environments

Today was a great start to science! We covered lots of material in a short period of time. This trimester environments will be our general focus. To start, we will be observing 2 different aquatic environments. Right now each table group in our classroom is in charge of managing a fresh water aquarium. We will track factual information in an Aquarium Log at each table group. This includes feeding, measuring water temperature, checking the water level and watching fish behavior. It will be a big challenge for all students to keep our little guppies healthy. There have already been some predictions that our tanks are going to get pretty dirty in a hurry.

We started work in our Science Journals by making observations. We discussed the difference between “fact and opinion.”  Students used a diagram to create more meaning for the parts of the environmental system. We learned that these are called environmental factors. Some examples we listed are the tank container, water, temperature of water, fish, etc…  If any of the environmental factors are changed it could affect the living organisms in a positive or negative way.  Below are 2 student examples of journal entries.  Thanks for sharing Julia and Darlene.