how to be a twig?

• Compound exercises (Bench Press, Deadlift, Squat) are your best tools for growth. Use them.
• Get strong! There are no weak bodybuilders.
• Learn proper form.
• Sleep at least 8 hours a night and take naps when possible.
• Drink plenty of water.
• Stop changing workouts every 2 weeks.

My middle school son has been enjoying a fabulous study of botany.  Today’s topic was the twig of a deciduous tree: What is a twig? Where are twigs located on trees? What grows on twigs? How do twigs grow?

We first learned about the terminal bud, which is the bud at the end of the twig where new growth (called the shoot) will grow from next spring.

Terminal bud scars circle the twig. These show branch growth from year to year.

Lateral buds, found all along the branches, develop just above where leaves are (or were) attached. Side shoots (otherwise known as new branches) will grow from these buds in the spring.

You can clearly see the new twigs that began growing from lateral buds on this dead branch. Above the shoot on the left side, you can also observe a leaf scar formed when a leaf fell off the branch.

We also learned that leaves grow in various patterns. They can grow alternately, like the leaves pictured above, or they can be whorled (in a sort of circle) or opposite each other on the branch.

My son spent time measuring the distance between bud scars, lateral buds, and more.  Measurements were noted in his nature journal and comparisons were made on single trees and from tree to tree.

We also had fun with an old Native American practice of measuring the height of trees. While not completely accurate (nor having anything to do with twigs), it is fun. You hold on to your ankles and walk away from a tree until you can see the top of the tree through your legs. Then, you measure from that place back to the tree. The measurement should be approximate to the height of the tree.

Botany and nature study can be so much fun, even if you never go any farther than your back yard!

Be sure to add this activity to your Delightful Deciduous Trees study!

Level: All

Duration: One hour+

Setting: Backyard or indoors

Materials:

The Activity:

Wrap Up:

Twig can be extended in many ways; you can add extra tags, filters, tests, operators, global variables, and functions. You can even extend the parser itself with node visitors.

Before extending Twig, you must understand the differences between all the different possible extension points and when to use them.

First, remember that Twig has two main language constructs:

To understand why Twig exposes so many extension points, let's see how to implement a Lorem ipsum generator (it needs to know the number of words to generate).

You can use a lipsum tag:

That works, but using a tag for lipsum is not a good idea for at least three main reasons:

In fact, you rarely need to create tags; and that's good news because tags are the most complex extension point.

Now, let's use a lipsum filter:

Again, it works. But a filter should transform the passed value to something else. Here, we use the value to indicate the number of words to generate (so, 40 is an argument of the filter, not the value we want to transform).

Next, let's use a lipsum function:

Here we go. For this specific example, the creation of a function is the extension point to use. And you can use it anywhere an expression is accepted:

Lastly, you can also use a global object with a method able to generate lorem ipsum text:

As a rule of thumb, use functions for frequently used features and global objects for everything else.

Keep in mind the following when you want to extend Twig: