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What's Wrong with the Plants?
Activity 3 (Extension--Library Research)
Encourage students to use creative resources in their research such as ‘nematode’ searches on the WWW, extension bulletins, interviews with agriculture specialists and college professors, college libraries, garden clubs, etc. You may want check points along the way to monitor student progress. The "Library Research Report and Presentation" forms may be used to evaluate students.
Post-lab Discussion
At the end of either Activity 1 or Activity 2, come together as a class again and talk about what happened. You might have each team take a few minutes to debrief their observations, experiment and/or data to the rest of the class and have students ask questions, give feedback, etc. The lab report will be turned in within a reasonable time after this discussion.
Term/ Concept Introduction
The ‘Term/Concept Introduction’ will follow the ‘Post-Lab’ discussion after Activity 1 or Activity 2. The lesson could be introduced with a short story or two of historical events that were influenced by some type of plant disease.
An excellent resource for plant disease history is "Famine in the Wind", by G.L Carefoot (see references). Some possible examples are:
--Destruction of coffee plantations in Ceylon by the coffee-rust disease
influenced the English to drink tea rather than coffee.
--The theory that the Salem witch trials were the result of the hallucinations
of young women who had possibly eaten bread that was contaminated with
a
rye fungus, ergot, a source of LSD compounds. As a result of their ranting
they were accused of being witches.
--The South American Leaf Blight and its affect on rubber production in the world
Examples such as these can create interest in the study of plant disease.
In the lecture/discussion phase of the unit, the teacher will teach the following:
1. The scope of Plant Pathology
2. Various causes, symptoms, effects, and examples of plant diseases
3. Basic principles of parasitism in plants
4. Anatomy, life cycle, pathogenicity, and control of root-knot nematodes
5. Plant disease control--pesticides and biological control
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics
General Biology Program for Secondary Teachers
warder@email.arizona.edu
http://biology.arizona.edu/sciconn/lessons2/lessons.html
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