Plant Extinction and Ferns
At Cogitania's Saturday Botany workshop fourth graders learned about plant extinction as a natural process and modern extinction rates that are now 10 to 100 times their natural rate due to human impact.
The students also learned about vascular, spore producing ferns, and their ability to survive for millions of years and mass extinction by evolving to the species that live on Earth today. To discover how ferns are different from seed producing flowering plants, students explored live ferns and using hand lenses and microscopes drew pictures of the ferns and labeled their parts.