Biology Lab—Botany Week

We’re coming to the end of our biology course; just one more week of labs to go! Modules 14 and 15 have been on plants. I think all the students (and I) thought that these modules have been a bit easier.

Over the past few weeks, the students have dissected flowers, drawn them, and labeled the sepals, stamen, ovaries, ovules, pedicel, anther, stigma, and carpel.

Observed and drawn slides of cross sections of Zea mays (corn) and Ranunculus (buttercup) roots and stems. Although they are all tired of doing microscope studies, they did agree that the plant slides were the easiest to observe of the year.

They completed leaf collections and identified leaf mosaic, shape, venation, and margins of each leaf.

And they identified types of fruit. I put out 16 different varieties of fruit, from apples and bananas to wheat kernels, to maple seeds and holly berries and they tried to categorize each type as a berry, pome, grain, capsule, pod, drupe, and so on. Then they compared their results and debated any discrepancies in identification.

 

We used our remaining class time to play “Climb the Vine,” a game I designed several years ago. This was a good review of the material from the two botany chapters.