By: Cara George, Caroline Flood, Cypress Utley, Jennifer Yan

Throughout the last three days, Governor’s School students have been branching out into the five minor courses. Students have been spending mornings in their elective classes that they selected the previous week. These electives have been highly anticipated by the students due to both the interesting subjects they could choose from and the chance to learn something new outside of their major.

The first day the problem solving students visited a sustainable tomato farm. This farm was special because it was all indoors! They also did a pasta tower challenge testing their team-building skills. During this they also learned about systems thinking. Finally they visited another sustainable farm that blended with nature, which provided breath-taking views.

Around 20 students learned about restoring community foodsheds as their elective course. Students got to tour the dining services farm at Kentland and helped move watermelon vines. On the last day of elective class, students went to a community garden and helped to make a path out of wood chips and clean up the garden. At the community gardens students were able to see different garden styles and plants, representative of different cultures of people that have used the gardens to grow plants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTWDkNaVuY0

Another minor option was animal reproduction. Students have been dissecting animal reproductive tracts (pregnant and not), practicing artificial insemination on “Breeding Bessy”, and participating in many crafts. Through this, students have learned about different parts of the reproductive tracts and the hormones that are produced. This helped the students to further understand animal reproduction and anatomy.

Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic organisms like fish and mussel. Learning about aquaculture and the biology of marine animals, students have been spending time in the wet labs. Hands-on-activities like trout dissections and cooking seafood have students actively engaged in learning about fish anatomy and healthy seafood consumption.

Throughout the aesthetic horticulture class, students worked on putting together mound bouquet arrangements, keeping in mind the elements and principles of design that they had reviewed prior to beginning the bouquets. One of the students from Plant Science jokingly commented, “This was the first time we ever got to touch a plant!” Jokes aside, the students in this elective have been working hard on their arrangements that they put together in class. Because their hard work, these arrangements will be featured as centerpieces for Friday night’s banquet.