Today after we got back from the field, I continued the identifaction and pressing process of the plants I plan to take back to school to share with my students. I had started this a few days ago and now I wanted to finish up the process. It seemed simple enough: 1. Lay out plants in plant press 2. Identify plants 3. Create pretty labels 4. Laminate plants Unfortunately, I mixed up steps one and two...oops. It is much more difficult (if not impossible) to identify a pressed plant. I should have identified the plant first and then pressed it so that I could more acutely tell the plants. My team couldn't even figure out a few so we ditched those and I moved on. Luckily, I had some help from my team. Once they helped me out with the plants I couldn't figure out, I looked up every spelling in two books that contains probably 99% of all the plants in Northern Alaska. I also looked to find the community in which each plant lives. I was hoping to learn is certain families of plants prefer certain communities and it looks like they do. Some plants grow very well in disturbed areas while other prefer wet meadows or dry tussocks. I learned a lot about the plants merely by the physical act of looking them up. It helped me to remember more about them. Maybe that was why my Spanish teacher always handed me a dictionary! :-)
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