The Micro World

The Micro World

FANR

Our Year One, Intro to Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources (FANR) students learned proper wet mount slide creation procedures and microscope operation.  Materials they used were thread and onion skin.  Their goal was to illustrate and identify an onion cell nucleus.  In the photo to the lower right, I was able to snap a photo of one student slide pointing at a nucleus.

In another activity, FANR student learned how to extract DNA from strawberry fruit.  They also learned what the physical and chemical methods  are for separating DNA from other cellular contents.  All students were able successfully extract DNA from their fruit.  You may have noticed they brought a tube home containing the DNA.

Animal & Plant Biotechnology

Biotech students learned how to use their previously learned sterile culture skills and added new skills to this set to include sterile culture of plant tissues: Plant Tissue Culture.  This is a valuable and powerful way to grow and rapidly multiply plant tissues to create whole plants.  Its also a technique that is essential for improving plant genetics involving the introduction of novel traits.  Pictured to the left is a fern plant the was divided/cut with a scalpel and cultured on new growth media to include fresh nutrients.  This fern tissue has been in culture for approximately 4 years.

 Research & Development 

Our students in this class have been working hard learning how to effectively locate published information and write a literature review for their project.  They plan to investigate natural breakdown of oils and dispersal agents to help answer questions about controlling oil spills.

FFA Career Development Event Prep

Students are seen here learning external animal anatomy in preparation for the NJ FFA Veterinary Science competition.  Students visited several posters to learn common features and concluded the lesson with a game / quiz testing their new skills.

Open House 2018

Please come visit the Agricultural Science program on February 3rd during our school wide Open House event.  This event is sued to recruit new students from 8th grade for our upcoming fall classes. Follow this link to learn more and register online.