Going beyond leaf peeping

By Stuart Hedstrom

Staff Writer

DOVER-FOXCROFT — Fifth-grade students in Barbara Buerger’s science classes at SeDoMoCha Middle School recently explored the world of plants by collecting different species of leaves outside their school. The pupils then examined several leaves in detail and used their newly acquired knowledge to create annotated colored hallway illustrations for passers-by to see.

Observer photo/Stuart Hedstrom

LEAF IT TO THEM — SeDoMoCha Middle School fifth-graders in Barbara Buerger’s science classes concluded a unit on plants by creating detailed annotated leaf illustrations, with the finished products displayed in the hallway. Posing by their drawings from plant species all found outside the Dover-Foxcroft school is, from left, Douglas Rowe, Kaleb Mudgett, Ryan Lile, Rylee Speed, Annie Raynes and Kirsten Marshall.

“This was their culminating project of looking at leaves,” Buerger said. “This is different than a writing piece, it really does increase their ability to observe something in nature.”

She explained that the students spent nearly two months studying plants before choosing some leaves to focus on with their drawings. “Four go into their scientific journals and I asked them to do one — their best work —  we would put in the hall,” Buerger said.

SeDoMoCha fifth-graders each have a science journal they work on throughout the year. “It’s something they can take home at the end of science,” Buerger said, as the various lab projects are compiled in the keepsakes.

Each leaf illustration included information such as the common and Latin names, vein type, type of edges and the arrangement, with the students learning how greatly the leaves of Maine plants can vary.

“We had to trace it first and then add the veins with yellow,” Annie Raynes said about her leaf. “We had to get all the details, where it was brown or rotted or where the holes are.”

“On some of the leaves it’s red so I had to shade over the light green,” Rylee said about the illustrating process for a flowering staghorn sumach leaf. “I took red and purple and drew all around it.”

“It is alternate with many different leaves in many different places,” Ryan Lile said after pointing out what he drew.

“It’s red pine,” Douglas Rowe said, saying the needles have “points on the top here that produce a kind of sticky stuff.” He added that he learned about the leaf cuticle and the layers that “take stuff in and keep stuff from getting out.”

Buerger said the students had several days to work on their leaf illustrations. “I think they did a great job,” she said.