When I started the internship, I thought that I would be able to contribute all kinds of info to Deanna!  When we started our first experiment, I realized that would not be the case.  In order for any kind of data to be reliable, there are many precautions that we need to take.  Everything must be sterilized and measurements taken precisely.  Team Ants understood the complications that we would face by trying to do this in our classrooms.  How would we be able to conduct these same procedures at our schools?  We don’t have the proper equipment and we can’t control the conditions in our classroom like we can in the lab.

Deanna helped us come up with an alternate plan so that we can contribute data to her studies.  Our students will conduct ant behavior studies that Deanna can use.  We will bring ant colonies into our classrooms, set them up in Petri dishes, and observe their behavior to document into a data table.  The next lesson plan is about isolating pathogens in soil.  I do not think that this data set will be contributed to Deanna.  We talked about setting up a Google Doc to record our classes discoveries and compare with one another.

I really hope that we will be useful!  It’s a concern of mine!

#lateentry #sobusywhenschoolyearstarts