Blast Off!

A few of the rockets my students made.

The eighth graders are done with middle school and are moving on.  During the last few days we completed our Forces and Motion unit by building rockets and shooting them off.  Mr. S has done this for years.  He build his own rocket launcher using PVC pipe and an air pump.  The rockets shoot off from all of the air pressure built up.  He has extra PVC pipes to use when building the rocket so the kids can make sure they have the correct diameter needed.

The day we made these was also my birthday.  I received some nice wishes and a note on my whiteboard:

They're simple rockets made from card-stock paper, but it was lots of fun.  A few of the kids made rockets that flew up really high and over the school fence. Most went a little ways up.  Others totally failed and only the top cone blew off and the rest of the rocket remained.  It was a fun last activity, though.

Mr. S ready to blast off another rocket.

Skeleton Reconstruction Results

My kids did a great job!  They loved this.  This was a really good learning opportunity.  My favorite part was showing them the pelvic bone and the femur and demonstrating how they fit together as a ball-and-socket joint.  That one was a favorite.  What other opportunity do kids get to manipulate real bones?

Just finished.  You can still see the glue still wet on some of them. 

Owl Pellet Skeleton Reconstruction

The last step of our owl pellet lab is here!  (See part 1 and part 2.)

The kids are taking their washed bones and gluing them into a complete skeleton.  For their reference, I'll have the following image on the smart-board for them all to reference throughout the lesson.

Click here for image.

The rubric requires the following things: bones placed correctly, missing bones drawn in, bones labeled correctly, neatly done.  The kids and I will work together beforehand to determine what exceeds expectation, meets expectation, and doesn't meet expectation for each criteria.  

In the end, it will look something like this.  This is my example I did for the kids to look at.  

You can already see there are a few scientific terms I'm not worrying about for my sped kids: mandible (jaw), metacarpals (fingers), metatarsals (toes), innominate (I'm using pelvis instead), and I'm not doing sacrum at all.

This should be lots of fun tomorrow. I'm excited about it. :D

Owl Pellet Dissection

This was an awesome class.

Have you ever dissected an owl pellet before??

Do you even know what an owl pellet is?  Well, let me inform you.  An owl will swallow it's meal whole, usually.  However, it does not digest everything it eats and the only way for it to get out safely is for the owl to regurgitate it.  Thus, a ball of hair, bones, and saliva are excreted from the owl's mouth.  The pellet.

Owl Pellets for use.  They seem small, but you'd be surprised how many bones you find inside one pellet.

Sounds disgusting, right? Yeah, well, it is if you think to much about it.  I had one of my students put on a permanently disgusted face the whole time I was explaining our task for the day.  But once you get into it you kind of forget what you're working with and just focus on discovering all of the bones in your pellet.

Can I just say that I have never had an entire group of middle schoolers so quiet and captivated for an entire 40-minute period?  They loved it.

Our beginning Bell Ringer.  The writing on the poster was small, so I allowed the kids to come up to the board to get their answers.  The red answers are what they told me after everyone was done.  

One of the posters in our board.  This was a great visual to use.

This dissection was optimally placed in our curriculum.  The kids had just taken a 3-day test and were exhausted.  No one wanted to do any work (teachers included).  So I scheduled our dissection for Thursday––after the test and right before spring break (another reason no one wanted to do any work). In and of itself it is engaging, and there is so much you can learn in a single session.  Plus, the kids are basically discovering and teaching themselves, so all the teacher has to do is facilitate that flow of knowledge.

This was the poster-sized bone chart.  Each partnership also had their own bone chart to use.

All of the posters in the class that day.  Available for students to use and compare their own bones to.  

What you learn in an owl pellet dissection:

• Lab safety
• Food Webs––what is the owl eating?
• Physiology––digestion of owls and bone structure of small rodents.  Also, how many animals can an owl eat at one time?
• Scientific Inquiry––what animal does this skull belong to and why do I think that?
• Environmental Factors
• Ecosystems
• Evolution –– common descent with bone structures
• Anything you want 

This can be done in one class period, or you can extend it into an entire interactive project.  I'm going to try and extend this project out. Not only are we done with testing (thus, relaxing the schedule a bit), but this is an engaging project and many students have already asked the next steps, i.e. what are we doing with the bones we've found?

So I'm excited.  The kids are excited.  This is an excellent project for any age.  The pellets are a bit expensive, but believe me when I say they are totally worth it.  TOTALLY.  So worth it that every year our principal buys enough for the entire 7th-grade to do this dissection. 

This video came with the materials, I think.
It was a great 15-minute introduction to Barn Owl life and the Owl Pellet Lab.

Starting the dissection

They split their pellet in two so they could each work on a section.

Very cool discovery––a skull!  A hairy skull, but a skull nonetheless.

One group's pile of bones. 

Magnetism

This will be a worthwhile post.   I'll not only tell you how to do cool experiments with your kiddos, but how to get your very own iron filings for free.

Hear that?  FREE Iron Filings!

When you have iron filings you can do cool experiments like this with the kiddos:

Pretty Magnetic Field Lines

I cut the corners of a piece of paper and folded them up to make a tray.  That way the iron filings wouldn't go everywhere.

I wish I could have let the kids try this on their own, but I don't trust them enough––I can see iron filings going everywhere and kids accidentally breathing in too much iron and then dying.  Not the best situation you want to be in as a teacher.

So instead we did a demonstration where they all stood around one table and watched.  It was cool and I the kids really liked it.  They also all asked me if they could do it themselves.  Since I don't want anyone dying, I said no.

Now for the part you've all been waiting for: How to get your very own iron-filings for free.


Method #1: 
Grab an old iron or steel nail and file it down with a heavy-duty file (not the wimpy kind you file your nails with, but a "manly file," as my husband called it.)  File down the nail.

I actually did this method for an hour during my Saturday afternoon.  I didn't get very much iron.  There was a small lump, and I could do some things with it, but you really don't get very much.



Method #2:
Place a magnet in a plastic bag.  Go outside. Rub the plastic bag in the dirt.  Lift and shake. There should be iron on the outside of the bag, attracted to the magnet.  Put this in a cup and take the magnet out of the bag to release the iron into the cup.  Tadaa!!  Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Depending on how much you want, this can also take a while.  The ASL interpreter in my first class told me about this, so during lunch I went out for ~5 minutes and just played in the dirt collecting iron.  It was awesome.  I got enough for our little demonstration above for my next class.

My little collection of iron filings from 5 minutes of Method #2.

I did also collect some dirt with this method.  So I took my dirty iron mixture and purified it even more by moving it from the cup to the final container using the same magnet-in-a-bag technique.  That lessened the amount of dirt quite a bit.  I used this second separation in my demonstration.

Method 2 would be a fun activity to do with your kids, too.  Make them go out and collect

real, natural iron from the EARTH!!!

and then use it to learn more about magnets.  (This could also go with any mixture separation lesson plans you may be doing.)

Yay for magnets.

Natural Selection Project

We don't have very much time for our evolution unit.  In fact, I'm only budgeting two classes for this (which stinks--one of my classes didn't even get to me today. The testing schedule was so crazy that our last class never happened and our third block just lasted twice the time.).  We have this week for evolution, then next week is REVIEW THE ENTIRE YEAR, and then the week after that is the big science tests.

Yay. Right?  Yay???

Anyway.  Because I didn't have much time, I had to make these two days good and worth it.  Today the lesson was focused on Natural Selection.  Thursday's lesson will be on classification, with a focus on reading and making dichotomous keys. 

I was SO excited about this lesson.  There were a lot of good interactive parts.

We started out with this Power Point activity:

Then we went to this website to play the actual game.  The online game allows you to make mutations to see if that can prolong your time on earth.  The kids loved it.  It's a fast game, so I had 3-4 students come up and try their hand at it.  Click here to go to the game.

Afterwards, we learned about Charles Darwin in this Power Point.  Who he was, what he did.  We talked about what evolution is and what natural selection is.

Then the kids had to create a project, which was indicated on the last slide of the second Power Point.  My example is below.  This is what I drew at home the night before.  In class I colored it up a bit to make it nicer. 

Example Student's project (kind of hard to see--the only camera I had available was my computer camera, and it's not very good. Apologies!)

The kids did really well with this assignment. I was pleased with the outcome. There was one last step, and that was to take their data from the chart at the beginning and make a graph from that.  This graph was attached to their project to show whether or not their species actually survived.  The graphing was hard for my kids.  We all figured it out eventually.