Keep Plates Clean Or Family Gets Sick

   Keep Plates Clean Or Family Gets Sick is a good piece of advice, but it's also a good way to remember scientific classification (taxonomy): Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. A man named Carl Linnaeus (b. 1707 - d. 1778) is the man on the left and he was the inventor of taxonomy. Carl was a nature man; in other words, he loved to study nature. He was a botanist, a physician, and a zoologist. He laid the groundwork  for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. Binomial nomenclature is the formal system of naming species. The name for humans is Homo Sapiens. Each species name is formed out of Latin, and has two parts: the genus name and the species name.

  
As part of our science lessons we did online binomial scavenger hunts on Wikipedia. We found out all sorts of plant and animal names.  This weekend we were sitting on the patio
when mom found a praying mantis. I let it crawl all over me and it felt weird! He is on top of my head in this picture.  The mantis comes from the order mantodea.
Today we did a plant dissection of a rose from our backyard (genus = rosa, that has over 100 species) and a gardenia (a genus of 142 species of flowering plants from the coffee family).  We did the dissection to examine the parts of the flowers - male and female parts, as well as the petals.  Check out this cool website from the Exploratorium in San Francisco to learn more about the secret life of flowers:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/gardening/bloom/secret_life_of_flowers/index.html