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On September 16th the 7th grade Life Sceince class traveled to Maxwell Wildlife Refuge for a day of exploartion as field biologists. Click the following link for pictures.
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In the morning students listened to a presentation by Cliff Peterson, range manager at Maxwell, explain how Maxwell came to be and what they would see on the refuge. He also talked about the local hisotry of the Santa Fe, Chisholm and Cherokee Trails, all of which run nearby. Students enjoyed a tram tour through the buffalo herd and stopped to collect a few samples at a buffalo wallow. They worked with partners to map a mini ecosystem on the prairie.
Improvising because of rainy weather students spent the afternoon in the museum as they participated in small group activities to observe and investigate some of the plant life in the refuge and apply information from the morning tour.
These activities included Plant Idenification, Building a Seed, and That's A Lot of Stomata.
Plant Identification: Grasses are one of the most economically important families of plants; they are grown as major crops, provide forage and shelter for livestock and wildlife, and serve as turf and ornamentals.
In spite of their prevalence, differentiating one species of grass from another is difficult because they tend to all look very similar. However, grass identification is critical for assessing the condition of range, pasture, and crops and for judging the progress of restoration of degraded grasslands.
Students learend how to identify different grasses by describing their anatomy.
Build a Seed: Before they can grow into new plants, seeds need to leave the seedpod. If all the seeds a plant produced landed just underneath the parent plant, they would be too crowded. The various methods of seed dispersal are designed to ensure that as many seeds as possible have a good chance of growing up to produce seeds of their own.
Students designed a wind dispersed structure that will carry a single seed (kidney bean) the farthest distance possible.
That's A Lot of Stomata: Did you know that plants 'breathe' through their leaves? Tiny openings called stomata allow plants to exchange gases necessary for cellular processes, such as photosynthesis.
The gas exchange that occurs when stomata are open facilitates photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process by which plants convert sunlight into usable energy.
Students collected a leaf and created a mold of its stomata. Observing under a microscope they counted the number of stomata observed. Do all leaves have the same number?