Lots and lots of Biology: 4/4

 Today was an unusual day, because we spent the entire morning working on biology - field and microscope work.

First, what non-biology stuff did we do...

1st Grader

• Spent a long time writing words that he saw on boxes and containers around the house with marker and paper.  I didn't tell him to do this.  He spontaneously did it and went crazy with it.  He also tried to write words on his own, which is amazing, because he's never done that before.  He was misspelling them, but I was just shocked that he tried without me even directing him to do this.

9th Grader

• Easy Grammar 10th Grade Ultimate Grammar workbook
• She worked on her Sonlight 230 reading
• Ballet class (outsourced)
• We watched Jane Austen's Emma (2020 movie)

The Autodidact (the graduate who will not stop learning)

• Life of Fred Statistics
• Norton's Anthology of British Literature (medieval)
• Bible reading
• Voice lesson (outsourced)
• Ballet class (outsourced)
• We watched Jane Austen's Emma (2020 movie)

Biology: Microscope and Field Activities

We hiked to a creek to collect water samples.  We planned to test the Ph of the water and look at the water under the microscope - looking for protists.

Ph was about 6.  We then learned that most creek water is acidic because of the decaying organic matter.

We had help.  That chirpy squirrel was giving us advice.

We took the water samples back home and looked at them under the microscope.  We actually had two microscopes going at once on two different magnifications.  400x seems to be the best magnification to find protozoans.  Here's some pictures of what we saw:

This guy was floating around and then it was caught in some plant matter.  It seems like its cell membrane broke open and the cell lysed.

I'm going to do some googling and see if I can identify this.  I'm not sure what it was.  It had a long flagellum.  Edited to add: After searching online, I think this might be a species of Euglena.  It had a slight green tint to it under the microscope.  

Under the microscope, this plant matter had very clear cell walls.

We stopped around 1:00 pm, because we have afternoon activities/classes.  We are letting the creek water sit in an Ehrlenmeier flask and we're going to take samples again in two days.  I'm curious to see if there is more cell life or less (I'm predicting less, but we'll see).