Unit 9 Reflection

This unit was all about taxonomy and classification. It was first created by a Swedish botanist in the early 1700's. He founded the system of binomial nomenclatures that separated themselves into eight levels of organization. This is still used today! The broadest category would be the domain which it divides into three: archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. The next level would be kingdoms. Eukarya contains of protista, fungi, plantae, and animalia. Fungi and plantae can be easily described, or easier than animalia. Animalia has over fourteen different, major groups, or phylums. There are chordates, arthropods, echinoderms, and etc. The next levels, in order, would be class, order, family, genus, and species.

 Even though this unit was pretty lengthy, I wish we could have expanded on more concepts. I wish we applied the classifications in history, like how would we classify dinosaurs and other animals that can be found in the geologic timeline. This also goes with out last unit, and you can read here about the geologic timeline we created. I'm still curious about the history of classification. We only skimmed over taxonomy's history and nothing else.

A big part of this unit would be our individual presentations on different topics of life. This was called the "What On Earth Evolved" presentations. I got to choose the interesting plant of eucalyptus. I didn't realize how many different types of eucalyptus there were! I always thought there was only one, and it was primarily planted in Asia, but it's actually Australia, the land of koalas and people who say "mate". I was really nervous right before I had to present, even though it's only thirty of my peers. I remember being very figety while the students before me presented. I couldn't breath untill I got up in front of everyone and started my presentation. I exhaled and continued with my slides. If I got to do it again, I would have look up a lot more and made eye contact with the audience. I also was reading off the slides for half of the presentation and wasn't as prepared for it as I wanted to be. For future presentations, I will have a tangible object because a lot of people liked how I brought a bottle of eucalyptus oil for them to smell. The picture below is of the oil that I brought in, which I also called "Asian oil" or my "childhood oil".