Amigos Dual Immersion School, Cambridge, Massachusetts

We are third grade students from the Amigos Dual Immersion School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We speak Spanish and English. Our teachers are Mrs. Pertuz and Sra. De Leon. We did the Bucket Buddies project with the help of the science teachers at the Maynard Ecology Center. It was really fun.

We went to Black's Nook Pond.  Black's Nook Pond is right next to Fresh Pond in North Cambridge.  It's smaller than Fresh Pond. This all happened on Wednesday, April 28, 2004. It was pretty warm that day, the temperature was 53 degrees F and the water temperature was 55 degrees F. The air was 2 degrees colder than the water.

Our teachers gave us spoons and strainers and with the strainer we dipped it into the water and found lots of creatures. We would sift around the edge of the pond for a few seconds.  We used the sieve to scoop up some muck from the bottom and if we saw something moving, it probably was an animal.  We put all t he animals into one big bucket. The way we took them out is by putting the sieve in the container so that everything floated.  Then we took the spoon and scooped the creatures out and put them in the container.  Then we went back for more creatures.

After that we walked back to the Science Center and we went to a little classroom to use magnifying glasses to examine the pond life we had collected.

We each got a strainer and lightly scraped it against the mud in the water.  Then we would look for movement and scoop it out with a spoon and put it in an ice cube mold.  Then we would look up what animal it was in the "Key to Pond Life". 

What we found was

6      Threadworms
6      Snails
8      Isopods
12     Damselfly nymphs
2      Caddisfly nymphs
2      Diving beetles
2      Water boatman
2      Mosquito larvae
2      Leeches
        Snail eggs

Photos from our visit to Black's Nook Pond

1. Exploring Black's Nook Pond  (amigos-bb1.jpg)

2. Taking water samples from Black's Nook Pond (amigos-bb2.jpg)

3. A student reacts to her pond sample (amigos-bb3.jpg)

FOLLOW UP ACTIVITIES IN OUR CLASSROOM

Come visit our Bucket Buddies page on our Amigos School web site to see these...

* more photos

* colorful graphs

* a creature movie (Damselfly Nymph Meets a Snail)

http://www.cpsd.us/amigos/tech/0304-bbuddies/index.html

* Graphing on the Computer

We used a program called Graph Club 2.0 to create a graph of the creatures we found at the pond. We used the identification pictures from the Bucket Buddies web site and then added some more pictures for additional creatures that we found.  Come to our school web site to see the results!   

* Investigating with a Digital Microscope

We brought a sample of the pond water back to the classroom. We used a microscope attached to our computer to look more closely at some of the creatures. We were able to record a movie of a damselfly nymph and a small snail. They were magnified with a 50x lens that makes them look 50 times larger than their actual size.

Here’s what one student said about the movie:

------  "I saw the snail go over the damselfly, but it looked like the damselfly was going to be smothered but he didn't get smothered, he moved, then the snail kept going."  - Quinzie, age 8

            Come to our school web site to see for yourself!