Life Cycles

          I can relate a lot of what I learned to what I already knew previously. Life cycles have been something that we have experienced ourselves, while also watching other living things do it as well. Living things are constantly growing and changing around us, which we may not pay exact attention to, but that is reality. Watching a dog have puppies, then watching those puppies grow up is an example of this. Taking care of eggs until they turn into butterflies in your elementary classroom is another example of this also. What I mean by all of this is, I am extremely familiar with life cycles, so it made it easier for me to make connections and understand the new material being given to me during this week's lab.

 

This week in the lab, we talked a lot about life cycles and looked at different examples, discussed the difference between dormant and active, and debated what is living and nonliving. Dormant means that something is not active or growing, while active is the antonym of that. A seed would be considered dormant because they must wait for something to happen before they can revive and show the characteristics of a living thing. Seeds become active when they are given water, warmth, air, light, and soil which leads to germination and the start of growing. There are other things which seem to be non-living, but if they are given the right conditions then they can revive and carry on living. Whether viruses are living or nonliving was a conversation we had in class that truly has no right answer. Some shared they believed it was living because they contain genetic material and reproduce. On the other hand, they are thought of as nonliving by some because they have no cells and no metabolic process. A life cycle explains the steps of how a living thing grows and changes throughout its life. My partner and I then created a model explaining the life cycle of a fish pictured above. A fish goes through the following process: 

-       Eggs 

-       Larva 

-       Juvenile Fish 

-       Adult Fish 

I believe that I can apply a lot to what we learned and did in the lab this week in my future teaching. Having students pick a living thing that they are interested in, whether that be a specific plant or animal, gets them more engaged and connected to a project such as researching the life cycle of them. Allowing students this freedom of picking and finding a way to create a life cycle model to share to the class would enable students to be creative while still getting learning and the work done. On top of that, having the class broken up into groups and put them in charge of preparing and growing their own plant, a member of the mustard or cabbage family, gets them the opportunity to see firsthand a life cycle while keeping it to a short period of time since the plant grows so fast. This gets the students hands-on experience doing an experiment while letting them feel connected to their certain plant they planted. In the lab, we did this exact activity which is pictured above.

The remaining question I have is about this experiment that we set up at the beginning of class. The experiment is pictured above What are we going to do with it, and what is it going to help us learn?