I’m in the home stretch this month finishing Biology. One of the last labs is the Photosynthetic Flotation and here or here, the lab we’re using. The most popular online schools in which the kids are,enrolled, require four formal lab reports. We need just one more.
Okay! Today was a bit of a mess. The kids and I spent an hour and a half doing the lab. By that I mean trouble-shooting the lab. Arrrrrgggggggh! After we spent 30 minutes trying different combinations of solutions of baking soda and detergent, the problem was with the disks. One, we used spinach, fresh from the store yesterday. The key is to remove any oxygen or air in the disks. Use the syringe and gently push the leaf disks back and forth in the syringe until they clump to the bottom. This lab won’t work if they are floating. You want to have the disks on the bottom and float to the top under a light. BTW I use an incandescent bulb in a goose-neck lamp. It is getting harder and harder to locate incandescent bulbs. Other bulbs take longer. Incandescent bulbs take about five minutes. I just needed one more good lab. Sigh.
No comments:
Post a Comment