The 7th Grade Science Classes were visited by Kyle Warren, Head Steward, of the Royal River Conservation Trust and Ember Hummel from the Maine Conservation Corps.  Together they presented a wonderful talk on invasive insects that are being introduced or could be introduced to the State of Maine. This will be followed up with a field trip next week to Spear Farm where students will walk the trails and get a hands-on approach to invasive plant species and how the RRCT maintains the green spaces in Yarmouth.

Here are some pictures of the talk.

Wednesday September 26th

Today we went over the provided Study Guide for Tuesday's Quiz.

We also showed how to use the Apple Word Document "Pages" to create a poster.

The following are some examples from past years.

Tuesday September 25th

Students had class time to work on researching their invasive species.
The America's Most Unwanted Project can be found here.

A reminder that all of their work can be checked against the following rubric.

The project will be due on October 2nd

September 24th - Class

Today in class the students chose their invasive species that they will research for the America's Most Unwanted Project.  For more information on the project access the link.

We were fortunate to have Ms Stuhr (our school librarian) come in and work with us on citation format.  For the most part the two major citations that will need to be used are:

    1. Website and
    2. Web Image

For Wednesday September 26th you should have all of your research completed and be ready to begin formatting your project layout.

Thursday September 20th

Two great articles published recently that relate to our study of lake ecosystems.

Protection of Maine Trout from the Portland Press Herald and from the Sun Journal an article on Algae Blamed for Fish Kill.

The following is a link to the America's Most Unwanted Project.  Please read over the rubric and go to the supplied links to find out more on this project as well as to choose an interesting invasive species.

Wednesday Septmber 19th- Class

Today in class we started our discussion on Invasive Species.

We watched the following PBS video on "Biological Invaders."

Quick Summary:

From southern India to South America, from Guam to the Great Lakes, a quiet but significant threat to ecological health and biodiversity is outrunning all efforts to control it. Invasive species -- foreign organisms taking up residence in ecosystems where they didn't evolve -- are decimating crops and displacing native populations, even loosing new human diseases, and costing the world economy billions of dollars a year.

The invasions haven't gotten wide attention until recently, and attempts to beat back the intruders have not met with great success. Finally, though, governments are starting to take notice and mount new efforts to combat the bioinvasion that has been spread by the surge in global commerce.

It's estimated that since Columbus, some 30,000 species of imported plants, animals, and microbes have taken hold in North America. In some cases, invasive species have been purposely introduced, and in many others they have stowed away in ballast water of ships, in crevices of airplanes, or aboard unsuspecting travelers.

Most of the time the foreign transplant doesn't gain a foothold in the new environment, but sometimes the organism has neither opponents nor predators and thrives in its new habitat. Examples include the zebra mussels that invaded the Great Lakes, fouling shipping and water systems; the pesticide-resistant whitefly in South America, capable of transmitting 60 kinds of plant viruses; and a comb jelly from the Americas that was accidentally released into the Black Sea, causing $350 million damage to fish stocks. 

We also read the following article from the University of Maine Cooperative Extention Publications on invasive plants in the State of Maine.

I had the students work in small groups to chunk the information using a Jig Saw Protocol and then had them share the information in a Google Document with the entire class.

September 18th - Class

Today we performed a task called the Human Bar Graph. Students used cards to represent the population of different species. When given a scenario they would hold the cards still, raise the card (increase in population) or lower the card (decrease in population) when a specific scenario was given.





Below you can find the link to a movie detailing a trophic cascade.  This can help you in your studies reviewing the material we went over in class.





Tonight's homework is to revise your Ecobeaker handouts and to complete the Constructed Response Question #11.

See these notes to aid you in this.