Week 4:
This week we continued dissecting the owl pellets. Once finished students were encouraged to first write down what they could infer about owls and their diets, once they had a chance to write their thoughts we had a group discussion. Students were very eager to discuss all that they had found and what conclusions they were able to come up with.
Once all the students had a chance to talk, we progressed onto the next part of the section of the lesson. This part the students were asked to put the skeletons they found together. By doing this students where able to demonstrate their knowledge of the layout of a skeleton and name the parts. From the groups we put together a bird, a vole, and what we thought was a field mouse!
Week 5:
This week we began the muscular and cardiovascular systems. For an elementary introduction we thought students would be more engaged in the lesson if we related it to exercise. For this lesson we would do some exercises and students would record their observations as well as color in a worksheet with various muscle and skeletal groups on it that they were using to complete the exercise.
The first activity was to pinch a clothes pin as many times as the student could before their hands fatigued. They would then record differences between the right and left hand and infer why they had these differences.
The next exercises included squats, arm raises, hand presses, and jumping jacks. Students were encouraged to think about how much energy was involved with each type of movement. The groups also discussed ways to keep their bones and muscles strong.
The last part of the lesson was for students to become the teachers. They were to come up with an exercise and teach it to the class. However, all of the other exercises took some time to complete therefore this part would be completed at the beginning of next week's lesson.
Week 6:
Students had a great surprise this week as a famous NBA player donated a substantial amount of money to the school for a computer lab and a smart board in the library!! This was an amazing contribution as technology was very scarce in the building. The only draw back is that there is no librarian in the school, so access to the computers is limited for now.
Once the unveiling concluded we began our lesson with the students. We started where we left off last week with students being the teachers.
All of the students thought individually about what they were going to present for an exercise and how they could teach everyone else to do it.
All of the students loved being the teacher and some actually wanted to teach twice. We wrapped up this section and connected to this week's lesson by talking about our hearts.
As a class we discussed if we need to make our heart beat faster or if it is involuntary. This discussion led the group into heart rate and how to check our heart rates. We demonstrated how to check our own pulses and all of the students found their own pulse and we counted our resting heart rates. After jumping jacks for 1 minute we counted our heart rate using our pulses. As a class we discussed why we need to exercise and keep our hearts healthy.
