Water Testing at The Trout Farm

The AP Environmental Science class was invited out to Henschel’s Indian Museum and Trout Farm earlier this month to test water quality in several of their ponds and wells.  This is the second year of an ongoing study of various water quality indicators including: nitrate, turbidity, total dissolved solids, dissolved oxygen, and pH.  It has been an invaluable experience for the students to do hands on water testing and compare measurements with the results that we’ve seen in the nearby Sheboygan River.  It’s shocking to kids that there can be such a significant difference between two ponds that are separated by only a few feet of walkway, but it can be explained when we test the two different sources feeding the ponds.  What we’ve learned so far is that this is a very dynamic system, and that the groundwater is moving with a great deal of freedom.  We’ve seen fluctuations in one pond associated with heavy rain events, while another one seems unfazed.  It’s a real challenge to figure out the system, making it a very exciting field study for these advanced students.  But at the end of the day it’s hard not to be exciting when there are several dozen rainbows jumping on the surface at feeding time.

Google Classroom 2016-2017

Welcome back!  Once again this year I will be using Google Classrooms for all of my classes as a primary way of communicating assignments and information with students.  You can still find my weekly lesson plans on this website by clicking on the "Lesson Plans" button to the left.

Electronics Recycling Event Success!

Last Saturday the ELGHS chapter of the National Honor Society hosted an electronics recycling drive in connection with Cybergreen, a recycling company based in Green Bay.  This event was open to everyone to get rid of old or unused electronic equipment in an environmentally safe way FREE of charge (except TVs and monitors).  All items collected are stripped of their valuable components for recycling by Cybergreen.  These items are not being shipped overseas and contributing to the growing electronic waste problem occurring in many developing countries, rather they are being domestically processed and kept out of landfills.  The NHS earns a percentage of the overall collection, so the more we collect, the better it is for everyone.  We will be hosting this event again next spring, so start saving your junk!  This year we nearly filled an entire semi, and we're optimistic that we can collect even more next year.  Thank you to everyone who came to support NHS and help the environment.

CAPP Biology Students at Lakeland

On Thursday the AP/CAPP Biology class spent the afternoon with Professor Greg Smith at Lakeland College performing a plasmid extraction and purification that we cut with restriction enzymes and ran in a gel.  Students then took the data from that gel to create a map of the plasmid sequence.  It was hours worth of micropipetting, microfuging, and electrophoresis...in other words, a pretty awesome day.