Jennifer Fiorentino earned a BA in Biology from Suny Oswego in 1996.  She began her teaching career two years ago at Long Island City High School in Queens, NY.  Jennifer has enthusiastically been working toward fulfilling her Masters degree requirements at night while teaching biology during the day.  She is very pleased to announce that she just completed the last required course for her masters degree.  Therefore, she will be awarded an MS in science education from Lehman College in September of 1999.  Jennifer is also looking forward to new teaching adventures including teaching Regents chemistry this fall.  It will be an exciting new challenge for her to take on while still trying to master the art of teaching biology.

Our group is hoping to use this exercise to emphasize the importance of biodiversity.  This project will serve as an example of how symbiotic relationships exist between many different forms of life on earth.  Another way this lab may be used is to emphasize the importnace of maintaining biodiversity.  It should be stressed that many potentially life saving ingredients are out there in nature just waiting to be found.  However, if we continue to contribute to extreme rates of species extinction, we may never find these treasures.  Finally, this exercise may be used as a supplement to lessons about the immune system.  It is important to understand why our diets can boost our immune systems.

Our group returned to the lab one week later to observed our results.  Overall, we found ginger and garlic to have the largest zones of inhibition, therefore, possibly having the best antimicrobial effect of all the spices we tested.  We found that with each spice tested, fresh spices were more effective at inhibiting microbial growth compared to their powered, processed, counterparts.  We also observed that most of our spices were more effective against E. coli compared to the environmental sample taken from the harlem river.  Overall, this would be a great experiment to do with your students because they have a greater interest in what is happening because the spices/herbs came from their homes.

On Tuesday, August 3rd, participants of the Commuter Institute took a trip to Peekskill to see the great biodiversity of the salt marshes and along the Hudson River.  It was the most beautiful day and the scenery was fantastic!  This is a trip that I would encourage teachers of all grades to take their students on.  Below I have included a few of the pictures we took while on our trip.

 
We all went to AMNH on Monday of the second week of the institute.  Overall, it was a very enriching experience.  The main focus of the time spent at the museum was to learn how to incorporate the Hall of Biodiversity into the Living Environment curiculum.  An activity that I found particularly useful was going out into central park and collecting samples of insects from the trees, bushes, and from the top inch of soil.  We brought back our samples and used a key provided to identify the organisms we found using a disecting microscope.  This is an exercise that can easily be done with your students in any park setting near your school.  We then went on to take a count of each type of organsim we found and as a class used this data to calculate the amount of biodiversity that existed in this particular area.  For the remainder of the week we spent time developing a unit on biodiversity.  We chose to work in a group of four.  Each one of us had the responsibility of designing about a week long block covering one of four main concepts including:  Ecosystem stability, why do we need biodiversity, what is the human impact on biodiversity, and how can humans help to maintain biodiversity.  This project will be made available to everyone on this site.  I encourage you to check it out to see if any of the activities we designed can help you teach biodiversity to your students.

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