Here’s an article in the Press Democrat about the outreach I took part in last week at SSU: ELOÍSA RUANO GONZÁLEZ THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | July 13, 2017, 9:13PM It was a campus takeover. Hundreds of elementary and middle school children swarmed the cafeteria, dorms, quads and halls of Sonoma Read more
We covered a lot of ground today. We started out with a lab activity, since we hadn’t had time to explore biomes fully the previous day. I started them out with a super cool Google Earth file that I found here. One of the resources is an interactive Google Earth map with layers that show various aspects of climate – average winter temperatures, average summer temperatures, that sort of thing – along with a layer that shows the location and distribution of biomes, worldwide.
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Not a whole lot to post about this day . . . once again (as usual on exam days), I didn’t take any photos. Our morning was taken up with the third exam, including an exam review session. No Pictionary this time, though . . . instead, I put together a game of Jeopardy, using this awesome Powerpoint template.
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Another favorite day! And another rotation lab. Today’s lectures focused on the diversity of vertebrates. We started out with chordates, and then followed the major groups all the way through their transition to land. In the morning, we covered fish, amphibians, and (some) reptilian vertebrates. Then, we stopped for some lab activities that allowed them to explore further the transition to land.
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Taking a quick break from Summer School posts to share something that happened on campus today: the school hosted about 450 elementary-aged students from the Roberts Family Development Center, a CDF Freedom School. Departments from all across campus set up hands-on activities, the Rohnert Park Fire Department and Police Department came out to say, “Hi,” and it seemed as though a good time was had by all!
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I know I keep saying this, but THIS IS ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITE DAYS OF THE SEMESTER! Today was pretty much fun from start to finish. In the morning, lecture on the diversity of plants, including the various adaptations that allowed plants to make the transition from the ocean onto land. After the lecture, I’d arranged for us to have a tour of the Tropical Greenhouse on campus. The greenhouse is across campus from the science building, so along the way I gave them a little walking tour of some of my favorite plants on campus, including a few Ginkgo trees, a Cycad (my all time fave), several ferns, redwood trees, and the Butterfly Garden. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures along the campus tour, but I have loads of pics from our greenhouse tour! We were welcomed to the greenhouse by Kandis, who provides instructional support for the Biology Department, and she is an exceptionally gracious hostess!
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Today, it was time to leave microevolution behind, and talk about how new species form. Now that they understand how adaptations and natural selection cause populations to change, it’s an easy step to understanding how this can lead to speciation. To drive that concept home, I put together a speciation activity based on this cool online natural selection simulation: http://sepuplhs.org/high/sgi/teachers/evolution_act11_sim.html. We also took an on-campus field trip to collect pond water, and see what we could find under the microscope.
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Today we covered sort of a hodge-podge of things, but there was a common thread – ways in which we can see evidence of evolution, both on long time scales, as well as short ones.
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Started out the day by picking up where I left off on my Darwin lecture, and then moved on to adaptations, and the principles of natural selection. I frame most of this discussion around the Oldfield Mice experiment, partly because it’s a perfect example of a scientific study that demonstrates the effects of selection on populations, but also because the mice are so cute! I end up using these mice as an example all the way through evolution and speciation, so I have a bunch of slides I’ve animated showing all sorts of things happening to the mice. (Selective forces, like being caught by a hawk when the fur doesn’t match the substrate; and, later, random forces, like severe weather).
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This is always one of the favorite topics of the semester – Mendelian genetics, and inheritance. We cover a bunch of really interesting stuff, including questions like: