Hunting Stomates
by Ron Maxwell, CMS Science
China Middle School 7th and 8th grade Science students spent the last few weeks learning about plants and by extension, photosynthesis. Plants may not be flashy science, but they are worthy science. The flashy part comes next. We learned about and observed the tiny openings on leaves that give us our oxygen: the stomates.
Stomates are tiny. Even using a hand lens, they are still too small to view comfortably. Putting a leaf under a microscope is useless if the microscope is not in full sunlight. So what is needed is a clever trick to make stomates visible under the microscope. That trick is clear nail polish.
The trick is to paint a piece of the leaf with nail polish and wait for it to dry. Then it is a simple matter to peel the nail polish off, like last summer’s sunburn. That peel is a three-dimensional mold of the shape of the stomate and can be viewed under the microscope, making an excellent way to see stomate structure.
If that isn’t enough, in the lab are digital attachments for microscopes allowing the student to make instant images of what is viewed in the microscope field. These images can be saved, used on lab write-ups, and projected for others to instantly enjoy. Any student can become an expert with something to share using this setup. In the lab work, the students do just that as they find something of interest.
The joy of the project is that it does so much for the students. Its clever simplicity makes the concept work for students of various levels. The subject of the lab helps students to use and appreciate the use of a microscope. The reporting out of findings in the lab unites the new world of computing with the old world of the microscope.