Exploring Life Science

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Mr. Major

Taking a break from their studies of San Diego area flora and fauna, our 5th graders explored a little microbiology by preparing their first wet mounted slides. Being careful not to stain their clothing students experimented with swabbing their cheek cells onto slides and then using either Iodine or Blue Methyl dies. Here is an example of a successfully stained slide:

OTA Vegetable Garden

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Mr. Major

Dear 5th grade parents,

Help us to make our garden a reality! In order to create the 5^thgrade vegetable and herb garden we have done the following:

Researched the 7 essential requirements for plant growth & conducted experiments to test their effect on sample plant life
We created 3-D layouts of our proposed garden using Google Sketchup
We split into groups to design and plan a garden mural painting featuring handprints of all class members, hanging garden sections (pictured above), raised bed gardens in recycled metal cylinders and composting bins complete with a lunch waste recycling program.