Can you believe it is the end of the school year!? I am shocked at how quickly it flew by! It was a crazy year with lots of events and prepping for my 8th graders to take their 10 grade Biology End of Course Exam (which happened at the end of May). I am totally ready for summer and relaxation! 4 more days for me!
I am so glad that's over and the students feel relieved to have completed the exam. This is when we get into dissections! as a way of "relaxing" my crazy teenagers love the idea of pretending to be doctors or veterinarians and operate on our dissecting specimens. As a congrats for them we dissected earthworms and frogs. The earthworm is a simple way of introducing the tools in the dissecting kit as well as proper ways of handling all the materials. One of my favorite things to do first in our dissection unit is to have the students create their "paper" earthworm or frog to get to know the various parts. This is where one of my favorite products comes in to play:
3-D Earthworm Dissection &
3-D Frog Dissection.
In my classroom we only have 55 mins for set up, getting the dissecting done, and clean up. Not a lot of time if you ask me. I spent 2 days reviewing the earthworm paper dissection to prepare the kids on what they should be looking for and then 1 day actually performing the dissections. I did the same the following week with the frog unit. As always, the students impressed me every step of the way with their work as well as their maturity during the actual dissection (it gets nerve racking handing a 14 year old a scalpel!) For the frog unit, we took it a step further. Instead of having the students write a lab report, they made a video of the dissection explaining the parts of the frog. Some of them got really excited and made some incredible videos. Check out one of the videos below the paper dissection photos, but tread lightly if you get queezy! Viewer discretion is advised!
Check out this paper Earthworm!
and the frogs!
Frog Video:
