First Daily Question Quiz

Today was a relatively relaxed day for you guys.  You got your school pictures taken.... which is always a blast....

Then I gave you some time to finish up the lab questions from the activities we did over the past two days.

Finally we took our first Daily Question Quiz!!   That was it for this first unit. 

This was just a quick way to show you in general what it means to be alive... other than....

Next week we will get into our first in depth unit - Chemistry of life.

Happy Labor Day - Enjoy your long weekend!!!

Characteristics of life lab day 2

Reminders:

Daily Question Quiz (DQQ) tomorrow!!!

Today's Daily Question:

 We took a look at some of our results from yesterday.  First we looked at our yeast metabolism lab.  Here were some of the results.

Those with the purple balloons were our control group.  They only added yeast and water.  No food!!  Because the yeast did not have anything to eat...... they released no waste!!  This is a VERY crucial part of an experiment.  Unless you have something to compare results to, you can make no valid conclusions!!!

Next up was a group that added about .5 mls of sugar.  The yeast ate it.... produce a waste product (in the form of carbon dioxide gas) and we captured it in the balloons!!

The red group added 1ml of sugar.  You can see that even more gas was captured

Finally the green group added the most sugar and had balloons that filled up the most!

If I was way cooler than I actually am I could have had us made a fun video like this.... but alas I did not - but if you want to see what happened after you left class check this video out!!

Next up was looking at the asexual reproduction of bacteria.  Some of your plates were just plain NASTY!!!!  Take a look at a couple of these bad boys!!

There was SOOOO much bacteria on this plate that it became a film!! 

this was bacteria from my computer, the remote for the white board and my hand.  Keep in mind that even the SMALLEST colony on these plates contains over a MILLION bacteria.  So there was a TON of reproduction occurring last night!!!

 The last characteristic of life that we are able to visualize is cellular organization.  I let you guys play around with the microscopes and look at different types of tissue underneath them.  Here are some pics from my digital microscope and some taken by my camera through the lens of you microscopes (they aren't very good but you get the point ;)!!!)

  Some action shots of you guys!!
(No faces ;) - No worries!!)

 You then had a lab wrap up worksheet that you started to go through - we will finish that up in class tomorrow after the DQ2

Characteristics of life lab day 1

We started into our first set of labs for the year.  We will be looking at a couple different characteristics of life in organisms other than ourselves.  We started with these daily questions though:

To hear the discussion that went along with these daily questions - view the screen cast below:

Then we set up a couple different labs.  Here are some pictures and descriptions of what we were doing:

Lab set up for the day!!

We took our living organisms (in this case yeast) and attempted to see if we could capture metabolism!

You added Sugar to the Yeast (Gave it some food!!)

I added a about 15mL of warm water and you guys shook the bejeebers out of it.

We put a balloon over the top
to catch all the "yeast farts"

And Immediately started to see
some action!!!

After a little bit of time we can already see how much gas is being captured!!!

Next up was to see growth and reproduction.  I mentioned to you guys about how much bacteria is in/on/around us.  MOST of this bacteria is harmless and often times NECESSARY for us.  To observe reproduction in action we need to use an organism that can reproduce very quickly.  Bacteria, if given the right environment, can reproduce themselves every 20 minutes.  Here are some pics as to what you did to set up this portion of the lab..

You chose different areas/objects to swab for bacteria.  Many of you were VERY creative in doing this!!!

You then transferred that bacteria to an agar plate that has lots of food for the bacteria to grow....

More plating of bacteria

Then I took a "before" pic of all your plates, placed them into an incubator that is at body temperature and we will see tomorrow what we have grown!!!!

First Monday the School Year!!!!!

Ok.... SO not everyone was as excited that it was Monday as I was.... Sooo........ Here's my "motivation" for today: 

 OR...... I guess I could be somewhat kinder and go with this ;)

We started today with the following Daily Question.  For today I had you write not only the question but ALL possible answers.  Today we at least got down the correct answer, but tomorrow we will go through all the incorrect answers and determine WHY they were wrong.  There is just as much (if not more) value in determining why wrong answers are wrong as there is in just finding the "right" answer!!! 

The last thing we did on Friday was talk a little  bit about the concept of what metabolism is.  Often times we think of our metabolism as simply how quickly we can digest/break down food.  In reality though metabolism is referring to ALL the chemical processes that go on in our body (which is a LOT - thousands in fact).

We know some of OUR waste products of metabolism.... but some don't realize that bacteria play a HUGE role in our bodies (in fact the number of bacteria in our body FAR outnumbers our own human cells.) I showed you a little video of the  nice gift we get from the bacteria in our mouths.

We then continued with the rest of the characteristics of all living things.  Tomorrow we will start into our first set of labs/activities!!  Have no fear... Its NOT notes all the time in here :)

Friday August 22nd

Today we started out with the following set of daily questions:

We did a quick review of yesterdays characteristic of life being that all organisms are made up of at least one cell.  I showed you guys how its hard to SEE cells - but we can see cellular organization.  I first showed you a whole sheep brain and then let you look at brain tissue under the  microscope to see the individual cells that make up a brain.

This is a microscope image that has been magnified 40 times to begin to show you individual cells.

We then continued through the following notes:

 

Great first couple days guys!!!!!!