science projects – Science-Lessons.ca

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Natural Science: How Do Crystals Grow?

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 00:23:34 +0000

A crystal is a special type of solid where the particles are arranged in an orderly and repeating pattern. When solids are dissolved in water, they form a solution, like when salt and water mix. As particles dissolve in water, the particles of the solid separate and distribute evenly throughout the mixture. Sometimes two dissolved particles move closer to each other and begin to attract, causing them to stick together. Over time more and more particles attach to the growing solid and “drop out of the solution”. The solid formed is a special compound called a crystal.

In this activity students will explore how crystals are made.

Materials:

Measuring cups (1/2 cup)
Tablespoons
Alum (spice can be found at grocery store)

Instructions:

Add ½ cup of hot water to 2 ½ tablespoons of alum.
Crystals will form within 30 minutes.
Want bigger crystals add more alum to the water.

How It Works:

When the alum and water mix, the alum begins to accumulate in clusters and as the warm water evaporates, it leaves the lumped crystals behind. The alum forms not just a solid, but a solid with a repeating pattern, making a crystal.

Discussion Questions to Ask:

How did were the crystals made?
What characteristics do the crystals have?

There are many places where crystals grow in nature, like ice crystals are often formed in the winter, in colder climates as the liquid molecules freeze. Also in caverns, there are stalagmites and stalactites that are crystals of calcium carbonate. When teaching concepts like crystals, young students may become bored as the formation of the crystal may take longer than one class period. To keep the students’ attention, incorporate crystals-related activities in other areas, i.e. math (counting or matching crystals), art, geography (where do crystals form in nature), even in physical education (students can pretend to be frozen crystals and play tag). It is best to start this activity and others that take more than one day on a Friday, that way when the students return on Monday the process is complete. For other science teaching tips related to crystals, visit: http://bit.ly/10l3FXy

And for other Fun Learning Science Games, we invite you to visit here:

http://www.literature-enrichment.com/

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Plant a Butterfly Garden! And 4 Free Guides and Lesson Plans!

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 15:10:37 +0000

Planting a Butterfly Garden is a Gift Free to All Ages from National Geographic IMAX! The following is the 1st Free Download (see bottom of of this article). Following this are 3 others including: Grade 7-12 Learning Guide; Flight of The Butterflies (79 pp); And, also in Spanish! See Below!

Objective: Students will plan and plant a garden in their schoolyard.

Background: Planning and planting a butterfly garden is a positive action that your students can take to help provide monarchs and other insects with resources they need to survive. In addition, they will work together on a long-term project, planning where and when to plant their garden, deciding what equipment and supplies they will need and actually planting seeds or seedlings. Since butterfly gardening is becoming more and more popular, you may be able to visit an existing garden with your students to get ideas. Other resources include our references, garden supply stores and conservation and gardening organizations. Many schools work with a Master Gardener in their area in planning and caring for a school butterfly garden.

In this lesson, we include suggestions for creating a school garden. Many of the ideas and information come from an article by Jennifer Goodwin Smith in the January 1995 issue of Science and Children (p. 29-32). She planned and planted a school butterfly garden with sixth and seventh graders in Maryland and wrote the article to make it easier for others to do similar projects.

National Geographic IMAX Flight of The Butterflies Trailer: http://www.imaxvictoria.com/trailers/index.cfm?trailerURL=http://destinationcinema.net/tcvideo/FOTBTrailer.flv.

Key Concepts:

• Gardens provide a habitat for many organisms.

• Humans can help preserve and cre-ate habitats for organisms.

• Seeds have various requirements for germination.

• Garden plants are either annuals or perennials.

Skills:

• Read for information

• Create representative drawings and symbols

• Use a scale measurement ratio

• Use a scale drawing to plant and identify flowers in a garden

Materials:

• Graph paper for planning garden layout

• Seed catalogs, gardening magazines, butterfly guides, books on butterfly gardens

• Seeds or seedlings

• Gardening supplies (soil, fertilizer, shovels, rake, hoe)

• Containers in which to start seeds (yogurt containers, egg cartons, nursery flats)

Step 1: Planning to Plant

1. Get permission from school administration and maintenance personnel. It is especially important to gain the support of the people who maintain the grounds.

2. Discuss how butterflies and other insects use plants, and how they need special plants at different times in their life cycle.

3. Discuss the work involved in a garden, including maintaining the garden during the summer and raising money for seeds and other materials. Also brainstorm benefits of a garden (such as decreased noise and air pollution from reduced mowing, reduced soil erosion, a beautiful garden, food and shelter for many organisms).

4. Develop a timeline for the garden. If you start from seed, you will need at least three months. A good timeline is:

• First month: get administrative support, choose a site, hold fund-raisers if necessary, order seeds, germinate seeds.

• Second month: monitor seedling growth, design the garden.

• Third month: prepare garden site, transplant seedlings.

5. Decide on the criteria you will use to judge a site. Important considerations include available sunlight, level of foot traffic, visibility to school and community and vulnerability to vandalism.

Step 2: Planning the Garden

1. Choose the plants that you will use. Sources of information include seed catalogs, gardening magazines, books about butterflies and butterfly gardening, and other resources.

2. Encourage students to choose plants that bloom at different times. Perennials are good since they only have to be planted once, but including an area for annuals will allow future classes to participate in planting each year. Also consider plant height, color and length of blooming time.

3. Make suggestions as to the garden design, such as choosing colors that blend and making sure all plants are visible (i.e., tall in back, short in front).

4. Plan the garden together, using graph paper to draw a plan of what you will plant where.

Step 3: Starting Seedlings

1. Buy seeds (or plan where you will buy potted plants). Sources include gardening catalogs, hardware stores and nurseries. You may want to plan to use a combination of seeds and purchased plants. Plants should not be purchased until it is time to plant the garden.

2. Have students bring in yogurt containers, foam egg cartons and other containers in which to start seeds. You can buy, borrow or ask for donations of potting soil, fertilizer, straw, shovels, a rake, and a hoe.

3. Plant seeds. Punch a small hole in the bottom of containers, fill with soil, bury seeds according to instructions and place containers on trays to catch extra water. Students should be responsible for caring for their plants. They can also measure plant growth, ger¬mination time, and other variables and keep track of their progress in a science journal or lab notebook.

4. Keep seedlings in a sunny window or under grow lights.

5. After 4 to 6 weeks, seedlings will be ready to transplant.

Step 4: Planting the Garden

1. Prepare the soil. Turn it over and add some fertilizer.

2. Plant seedlings outdoors. Make sure danger of frost is past.

3. Apply mulch to prevent soil erosion, maintain soil moisture and slow weed growth.

4. Set up a schedule for garden maintenance as a class. Tasks may include watering, weeding and replacing mulch.

5. Set up a time to observe the garden once a week. Keep track of what plants are present, which are blooming and what insects are seen in the garden.

6. Clarify a no pesticide policy.

7. Make a plan for caring for the garden over the summer. Parents are often happy to help, especially if they have been involved in planning the garden. The more people are involved, the less likely your garden will become a burden for a small number of people.

NationalGeographic IMAX Free Classroom Butterfly Lesson Plan Guides!

Classroom Activities – Flight of the Butterflies – All Age Groups

Classroom Activities – Flight of the Butterflies – Grade 7 to Grade 12

Educator Guide – Complete for All Ages – Flight of the Butterflies -sm (79 pp)

And in Spanish!

Spanish – El Vuelo de las Monarca – Guia del Educador – 11.1.12 – FINAL

Other Great Butterfly Learning Resource Links:

Our Favorite: The Karner Blue Butterfly Recovery Program, in New York:

http://www.albanypinebush.org/conservation/wildlife-management/karner-blue-butterfly-recovery.

Wilton Preserve Blue Karner Recovery:

http://www.wiltonpreserve.org/conservation/karner-blue-butterfly.

Nature Conservancy Karner Blue Recovery

http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/indiana/journeywithnature/karner-blue-butterfly-1.xml.

Nature Conservancy of Canada Karner Blue Recovery

http://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/what-we-do/resource-centre/featured-species/karner_blue.html.

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

http://spotabutterfly.com/.

New Mexico Butterflies

http://www.nmnaturalhistory.org/300seconds-butterflies.html?searched=butterflies&advsearch=oneword&highlight=ajaxSearch_highlight+ajaxSearch_highlight1.

And for other Fun Learning Science Games, we invite you to visit here:

http://www.literature-enrichment.com/

And Our New High School and College Study Guides (All Supporting The Recovery of The Karner Blue Butterfly!:

Pass the Nelson Denny: Complete Study Guide and Practice Test Questions:

http://www.amazon.com/Pass-Nelson-Denny-Complete-Questions/dp/1482620588.

Pass the PSB COMPLETE Health Occupations Aptitude Exam Study Guide and Practice Test Questions:

http://www.amazon.ca/Complete-Occupations-Aptitude-Practice-Questions/dp/1481200682.

Practice the HOBET V!: Health Occupations Basic Entrance Test Practice Questions:

http://www.amazon.com/Practice-HOBET-Occupation-Entrance-Questions/dp/1479104000.

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Science of Olfactory Response in Deer, Racoons and Coyotes – Saving our Edibles

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:25:25 +0000

In this article we discuss our landscape experiment of preventing racoons from reaping the entire harvest of the plum tree, while at the same time, welcoming and sharing the flowers with the resident deer. The racoons were eating all of the plums from the tree (not sharing!) and then leaving a huge mess afterward, with nowhere then, for us to sit and read by the tree.

After each Tier of your Experiment, record your results and present your findings to your Science Classroom Teacher and share with your Classmates. First choose a critter to deal with who has been causing a bit of havoc on the land to your plants. The critters we were dealing with were racoons and deer, but we didn’t want them to go completely away as they are so beautiful and cute! There are 5 Stage Tiers to our experiment: Science Experiment: Warding off Racoons, Welcoming but only Sharing with Deer!

Tier 1: Jars of Ammonia

Place small jars of strong smelling ammonia around the plum tree to ward off the racoons. This seemed to reduce the number of visits to the Plum tree by the racoons, but did not stop from still making a huge mess, both of their pits and their scat, nor did this deter the canine visits. There was also a scatter canine (dog) who left a mess too.

Tier 2: Radio

Find a small transistor radio and place it in the area turned on. The sound of people talking and singing seems to alert them to possible interruption and danger. This again, helped a bit, yet, when it rained we had to find an umbrella for the radio, and also had to keep charging the batteries to keep it on all the time. This deterred somewhat, the racoon, but not the canines.

Tier 3: Predators – Bringing in the big guns

Determine the main predators of the critter you are dealing with, and spray the area or soak cottonballs and place near their general entrance. If you can find the synthetic scents of the predator in a local hardware store, spray the scent around the area in which you do not want the animal to eat. For racoon, we think the key predator is the Coyote, and synthetic coyote pee ought to do the trick to scare them back to another route. This apparently is not a favorite friend to canines (domestic dogs) either. We are only beginning to run this part of the experiment.

Whereas we wish to reroute them, and not hurt them, this seems a pliable stage to our experiments. And whereas also, we wish to welcome the deer, though not let them eat all of our fruits, vegetables and flowers, we are planting in 3 different areas. This is slightly to the chagrin of our neighbours who want them to go away permanently, but we love them and believe them to be Beautiful Innocent Resident Deer who are vegetarian and who provide good “clean” “scat” for the compost for our vegetables.

Area A: By the plum tree, with synthetic predator spray

Area B. By the top of the walkway, with no predator spray

Tier 4 and Area C: By the bottom entrance, with only vegetable oil and egg mixture. Apparently, deer so not like the mixture of Egg yolks, light spices, milk and vegetable oil. Giving the perimeter once every 10 days to 2 weeks, this ought to deter their olfactory responses to finding other flowers and vegetables to eat. We will see!

Tier 5: Bringing in Bear

We hope we would never come to this, and it is Synthetic Bear Pee Spray. When we are hiking we like to have Bear spray to ward off Bears should they approach you – that is a different kind of spray altogether. But if Bear approaches you and looks at you face to face, would you have the strength of will to dig through your hiking pouch and pull out the spray? You bet! But in this experiment, we are suggesting the opposite kind of Bear Spray that which wards the animals off whose predator is Bear. Apparently Bear is the main predator of dogs, a predator of racoons, and rodents and this Spray ought to definitely make them retreat.

Olfactory Senses of Deer, Racoons, Coyotees and Bears

Deer – The two species of deer found mostly in North America are the white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus and the mule deer Odocoileus hemionus. The most important sense in these – and in most animals – is olfaction – the sense of smell. The preorbital gland of the deer is about an inch in length, Wikipedia says it is “not entirely clear whether the preorbital gland secretions of North American deer emit an odor that is significant in terms of chemical communication”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preorbital_gland#North_American_deer.

Most of the time, the glands remain in the closed position. The preorbital gland is a pair of exocrine glands, trench-like slits of dark blue to black, nearly bare skin and are around the eye. Interestingly, they secrete pheromones and other chemical compunds onto twigs and branches as part of their communication system to other animals. This is most interesting whereas some people do not consider animals to be “intelligent” in the way of having abilities to communicate with one another.

The moist nose of a deer, similar to that of a dog, allows the deer to pick up the faintest of odor particles that are then drawn into the olfactory organs. A deer can detect the odor of approaching danger several hundred yards away. Their elongated noses are filled with an intricate system of millions of olfactory receptor sites (near 3 million as compared to only 5 million in human beings. Their keen sense of smell is very important for avoiding predators, identifying other deer, and identifying food sources. Their sense of smell is important for scent communication with other deer. Deer have seven glands that are used primarily for scent communication.

Racoon – They have a good sense of smell, this sometimes being used to locate food, for example when it is buried in snow. They are also known to use scent in intraspecific communication. Raccoons have an excellent sense of touch, in that they smell with their paws and nose. “The forepaws are much more sensitive than the hind paws, with four times as many sensory receptors and a larger number of CNS cells responding to ventral forepaw stimulation.“

twycrosszoo.org/S/0MCarnivor/Procyonidae/Procyon/Procyon_lotor/10PlotorDetPhy.htm Typically, they identify the food with their eyes (visually) or with their noses and hands (through olfaction), they then proceed to grasp the item with their forepaws. “After grasping the object the object is rolled between the palms”, and the little pads of the digits (the fingers). The food piece is then brought towards the mouth. Raccoons always fiddle with their food with their paws before eating it, giving it a feel and assessment before eating it. wildpro.twycrosszoo.org/S/0MCarnivor/Procyonidae/Procyon/Procyon_lotor/11PlotorBehFeed.htm

Coyotee – Prairie Coyote Wolves are scientifically named Canas Latrans, which means “barking dogs”. Like the deer, it is the coyote’s wet snout that keeps its olfactory response running.

Bear – One of the animals whose sense of smell is strongest of all animals is Bear. www.buzzle.com/articles/animals-with-an-amazing-sense-of-smell.html. Bears have thousands of small receptors opposed to their very large smeller (nose). Better than all other animals in smell detection, Bear has 5 times the size an olfactory region in the brain as compared to human beings.

And for other Fun Learning Science Games, we invite you to visit here: