This week during supply work, I came across an awesome science activity that had the students in awe. It was something that I have never seen in a classroom before and as the teacher, it had me intrigued, so you can just imagine how the students reacted. The grade five teacher had ordered a "Deluxe Classroom Owl Pellet Kit", which included wrapped barn owl pellets for students to dissect. Before getting started, I posted the information posters that were included in the kit around the room. This gave us an opportunity as a class to read up on the information about the barn owls to know what to expect. The posters displayed images of skeletons to critters such as birds, moles, shrews, human, and vole. There were also posters explaining the food chain, as well as a poster where skeleton pieces were laid out for students to be able to match during the dissection. Once the discussion was finished, I had each student place a large piece of paper on their desk to act as a placemat, which avoided many messes and I highly recommend! I also handed out a sorting sheet to each student to act as reference during the observation and discovery of many different bones. Due to the fact that each pellet was different, some students found more bones than their peers, which is why we ended up doing a gallery walk at the end of the class to ensure every student had a chance to see as many bones as possible. At the end of the class, students piled all of the feathers and fur they found into one heap. We had a class discussion and predicted how many animals that may have been included within the entire dissection kit. As an exit ticket, students were to answer what they learned about the food chain, as well as an interesting fact about the skeletons that they had learned about that day. This day as a supply was definitely one for the books!
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