In addition to master artist, architect, engineer, geographer, geologist, astronomer, chemist and palaeontologist, you could label Leonardo Da Vinci as a zoologist and botanist too. His fields of study knew no bounds. He ventured into biology often through studies of the human anatomy and the studies of animals and how they interacted in their worlds including the plant life of their environments.
In his lifetime, Da Vinci wrote out thousands of pages of observations and experimentation. Today, a little over 4,000 of these pages still exist and are currently being decoded and translated. He wrote most of his notes in Latin, some of which were written backwards (mirror images) so that no one would be able to understand what he was doing. Others were written as codes requiring a cipher or key to unlock and translate them. Da Vinci was a master of hiding things in plain sight.
However, you will not have to hide things in your own notebooks. You will write in plain English in ordinary left to right fashion....and a little Texas slang once in a while will be ok too. We'll work on dissections, chemical reactions, germinations and general microscopic observations. We'll get indepth on each subject and learn to graph and plot our data like real researchers and interpret the data of others. We'll learn to apply the Scientific Method as well as the best way to take and pass that pesky End of Course Exam.
Biology will be fun this year. Don't forget to refer to this page for updates, important dates and help on your work.
See you in class!