Fungi week 2

Week Two of Mycology in Science Club!

On Sunday, Zac found Devil's Dipstick in the vegetable garden, so I took a photo of it.

On Monday the children eagerly sketched it and compared it to our Pink Oyster Mushroom grow kit, which was cheerfully fruiting.

On Wednesday, the Pink Oyster Mushrooms were already sporulating!

SWI < sporulating >

spore/ + ule/ + ate/ + ing

When we looked at this word in Structured Word Inquiry, the children loved how many time replaceable < e > was in the word sum!

On Wednesday we did several things for Fungi during the school day, and several more during Science Club.

At 10:15 am, after snack, we watched the documentary Planet Fungi (ages 7+), which was filmed in the Eastern Himalayan Mountains of India. The time-lapse photography was so beautiful! This film goes very well with The Boy Who Grew a Forest: The True Story of Jadav Payeng by Sophia Gholz. His forest is the first place the filmmakers visit, and Jadav Payeng is one of their guides as they travel around and search for fungi to document.

Another book which goes well with the film is Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature's Undead by Rebecca Johnson, especially if your child finds Cordyceps to be creepy in a cool way! Two parasitic fungi are featured in that book:

Entomophthora muscae
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis

The children found the pink oyster mushroom spores fascinating, and we wondered how big they were. We got out the digital microscope, which is 250x magnification, and they were still microscopic. The children were astonished that the fibers in the black piece of construction paper (which I put under the kit, so we could see the white spores as they were released) were MUCH larger than the spores!

At 3:30 pm, during Science Club, we began by recalling the Linnaean classification for human beings.

Kingdom - Animalia

Phylum - Chordata

Class - Mammalia

Order - Primates
to help children see the difference between Homo sapiens and other primates, I like Monkeys and Other Primates BINGO

Family - Hominidae
to help children see the difference between Homo sapiens and other hominids, I like the Human Evolution Card Set from Clocca Concepts

Genus - Homo

Species - H. sapiens

For more on Linnaean classification, I also like the book Karl, Get Out of the Garden!: Carolus Linnaeus and the Naming of Everything by Anita Sanchez.

Next, we got out my set of 7 nesting boxes (KPCOFGS) and looked at the scientific classification for Devil's Dipstick and Pink Oyster Mushrooms. We compared these two organisms step by step to see where they are the same and where they depart from one another.

It is interesting to think that scientists must have created a series of questions that they ask themselves in order to decide, is this the same box or is it a different box? What are the questions for humans? What are the questions for fungi?

Is there a Fungus Flowchart that scientists follow?

What is it that makes something be in that first big box to begin with?

We will come back to this question of what makes a Fungus a Fungus next week. For now, I asked them to share what they drew in their Science Notebooks last week. (They were asked to go into the yard at the end of class and draw something that they thought was in the Fungus Kingdom.)

What did they draw last week? Why do they think it's a fungus? What might be evidence that it is, and what might be evidence that it is not?

This led to a very interesting discussion. They had many questions about mosses and lichens.

Moss?

It might be a fungus because...
it doesn't grow too tall
sticks to surfaces
can grow sideways
likes damp places

It might not be a fungus because...
it lasts a long time


Lichen?

It might be a fungus because...
it sprouts all over the place
likes damp places
grows on trees (this girl carefully explained, "I've seen mushrooms grow on logs, so they grow in the same places")
lichen resembles the shape and texture of a turkey tail mushroom

It might not be a fungus because...
it is green
does photosynthesis
grows slowly

Again, we will return to this next week, and what makes a Fungus a Fungus. I have been trying to give them lots of think time for their questions. Last week I told them they would get a portion of dormant yeast (cold, from the jar in my fridge) to try to wake up, and they got lots of time to think about how they would do it. So we wrapped up the session with everyone getting 1/2 T of yeast and a bottle...

They had to make a plan in their Science Notebooks first and then bring it to me before they got their ingredients. The plan needed to include the list of ingredients and the measurements of each. I gave them only a few measuring tools so that they'd have to practice conversions and fractions.

Ingredient List

flour
sugar
salt
milk
warm water
ice cubes
baking soda
vinegar

Measuring Tool List

1/4 cup
1/2 tablespoon
1/2 teaspoon
1/4 teaspoon
funnel

It was very interesting to see the experiments they came up with. Most of the children tried hard to get their yeast to wake up (the evidence being bubbles appearing in the bottle), but the oldest child, who is 13, came up with an inhospitable environment for his yeast to overcome first. He added an ice cube to keep it dormant for longer, sweet foods that it would enjoy (like milk and sugar), and a baking soda & vinegar reaction on top of everything. Once the yeast warmed up and began to eat the sugars, would the reaction have created an inhospitable environment for the yeast?

When the children came in to school on Thursday morning and observed their bottles, they wondered if yeast makes spores. Did the yeastie beasties in each bottle frantically throw spores out before they died, like the Pink Oyster Mushrooms? Will the Pink Oyster Mushroom spores sprout on my kitchen counter? What does it take for a spore to survive? What is the scientific name for yeast? What are the seven classification boxes it is in?

We have brainstormed a ton of really interesting questions about Fungi already so far, and it's only the end of week 2! And we have only looked at three fungi: Pink Oyster Mushrooms, Devil's Dipstick, and Baker's Yeast.

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