Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to classify plants using our dichotomous key. Now this mission will not be easy, but it will expand your abilities to understand scientific groupings. Now this is the packet you will be using. There will be many vocab terms that you will not know, but we'll introduce you to them before we get started. Here is where we will begin. This is a tree we see in this area quite a lot. Now we will begin with a few examples and then we'll let you get started on your mission. When I see a plant, I need to answer a few questions for myself. We can start by asking how the leaves look, right? Are they serrated on the edges? How are the veins inside the leaves? And how are the leaves positioned on the branch itself? So these are a lot of important characteristics I need to ask myself. This plant looks significantly different from the last plant we looked at. Being a botanist, we're allowed to cut pieces off the plants, so we will do so. When we look at these plants, we need to make sure we look for the same characteristics. These leaves are very different from the last leaves we looked at. They're very long, thin. They have a white appearance and they are definitely a lot of flowers at the end, so this plant will definitely be very different in our dichotomous key. All right, so here's a plant we can actually show you how to use the dichotomous key with. It's a very simple plant. We'll go ahead and show you how you read through the steps. First, I'm going to flip to the part of the book that shows that it's a shred. I need to know the way the leaves sit on the stem. Are they opposite? Are they alternate? These are all terms we'll teach you the meaning of later. So let me show you how that's done. So now that I've decided the leaves are alternate, I've looked at my options here and I've said no, it's not opposite, it's alternate. Now I go to number 29. 29 asks me more questions. Is it a compound leaf? Some more details? Or is it simple? This one is definitely compound. I'll teach you why later. So we go to 30. Are they ever green leaves or deciduous? And we continue on. So we finally reach Rosa Woods' eye, which is our correct option. Now in the past, we're not learning much about the differences between lots of plants. We'll look at a few pairs of plants that look really similar to each other. But most of them, we're going to look at groupings and try to figure out how they look similar to each other. So we're going to look at characteristics that make, oh sorry, my going too close. Is that where you want me? Do you need me to do that again? Every now and then you're going to want to be able to tell plants apart. So for example, we have a video on poison sumac versus staghorn sumac. Well poison ivy is a vine with leaves of three. Poison sumac is a shrub and has lots of smooth-edged leaflets. And here's its familiar imposter. It's called staghorn sumac. It's much more common than poison sumac, but it won't give you a rash. Staghorn sumac has leaves with teeth and fuzzy stems, much like a male deer's antlers during the summer, hence the name staghorn. The plant has clusters of red, hairy looking fruit, which brings up an interesting point. The harmless staghorn sumac has red fruit while poison sumac and poison ivy have white fruit. In the end, the point of this unit is that this is another great way for you to get a great date this week. And actually, oh no, oh it's inappropriate to give them dating kids. Oh yeah, that was the point of this unit. The point of this unit is actually to help you understand why all maples are classified as maples and all elms are classified as elms or grasses or pines or any grouping of plants you can name. Why are they in that group? So hopefully you get that by the end. Thanks for joining us. During this next time for the next installment of this series, Life of a Buzzer. you Still here? Time to go! Videos over folks. That's all folks. Should leave now.