How To Get Your Class Interested In Foraminifera

By Lisa Meyer


It is always nice when you can find something that is educational, particularly for the young ones. It is easy to forget just how steeped in wonder the natural world is when we get too caught up in the day-to-day. It is a great idea to get young people's curiosity sparked by showing them something like foraminifera, also commonly called forams.

Some people simply cannot learn new information when they just have to sit and listen to somebody give a lecture on it. There are plenty of people who find that more hands-on approaches to learning are more effective. That is a great reason to try out looking at these organisms under a microscope in the classroom.

There are so many things that you can learn online about these types of products. It definitely makes it a lot easier to figure out what you are looking for when you do things this way. When you do your research online, you will also get to learn everything on your own time and can allow yourself to be completely comfortable as you browse from page to page.

Almost all of these organisms are marine creatures. They might live in freshwater, but they are much more commonly found in the ocean. Other than that, there are very few of these types of organisms that are land-dwellers. Those are the ones that are rarest to find, so when people are looking for organisms like these, they will usually look to the waters. It is not that hard to scoop up a jar full of water and put a drop of it on a slide just to see what you can find.

You might start by looking at diagrams if you have never seen this kind of thing before. Seeing things this way gives you the benefit of knowing what to look for before you actually try to hunt the things down under the lens of your microscope. Priming yourself with a diagram makes the whole thing a bit less overwhelming.

These creatures are armored, which is great for keeping their core protected. The shell that surrounds their middle section is one of the features that makes them quite easy to identify. The scientific name for this shell is the test, and an easy way to remember that is by thinking that the foram is going to "test" the hardness of its shell by ramming it up against a hard surface.

The way that this creature eats is certainly a sight to behold. A membrane that surrounds it goes off in many little arms that resemble fibers or hairs. These are used for many different purposes, but one of the main ones is bringing in things for this organism to eat.

Some people wonder why they can't see these things with their naked eye. The truth, although obvious as it might seem, is simply that they are too small. Being only single-celled organism, they are much too tiny for a person to be able to look at unless they have special magnification tools like a microscope.




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