STEAM with Dad

Last week I had the opportunity to use a real microscope. A friend of my Dad's has one and he showed it to us. One of the things we saw was the skeleton leaves that we talked about in the previous article. I think the photo was really cool This other photo is from the top side of a leave. You can see a white vein. You might be wondering what that little black line is? Yes, the one that looks like a closed eye. Well, that is a estoma. We saw in the previous article that estomas are used to breath in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen. The majority of the estomas are on the bottom side of the leave. You can see them here more closely. These ones look like they are open.  Finally, we cut the stem of a leave hoping to see the xylem and the phloem. Our friend told us that the spiral you see in the photo is the Xylem. The plant uses the xylem to bring up water from the roots

You might be wondering what photosynthesis is ? Well I'm glad you asked. Photosynthesis is a process the plants use to make their food.  They take in H2O which is water and carbon dioxide or CO2 sunlight and with that they reproduce glucose and oxygen. The water comes up from on the roots through a tube called xylem and carbon dioxide goes in through the estomas in the leaf. The glucose they produce goes down another tube called the phloem to other parts of the plant and chuck out the oxygen through the estomas. I built the molecules with my new chemistry model kit. You can see photos of the full chemicals reaction below. The simplest carbohydrate which is basically a sugar. This is the basic building block for the plants and it is used to make everything from leaves, fruit, pulp and bark. For example the plan change of as many as thousands of glucose is to build cellulose. The cellulose is used to build the pulp of the trunk which is what we used to make paper. The following is a ...

In this blog post we will be showing you how to make your own skeleton leaves. Well you might be wondering what a skeleton leaf is. Well, it's basically the inside structure of the leaf that supports it and also includes tubes that transport nutrients. There are two types of tubes: the xylem and the phloem. The xylem brings water from the roots up the phloem brings glucose down. To make skeleton leaves  you need to gather some leaves from many different types of plants because you don't know which ones are going to work and which ones are not going to work.  For the next step put them in boiling water with baking soda for one hour. This makes the water alkaline and it helps destroy the soft parts of the leaf that we don't need. Then, put them in a little bit of water with a tablespoon of bleach for a few minutes. In our first attempt we put too much bleach for a few hours so some of them became white as you can see in the photo Then, you need to start brushing it. You wil...