Regurgitate

You are probably wondering why I would ever title a blog post "regurgitate." You might be wondering why I am thinking about throwing up, because, after all, throw up is not a typical or amusing topic of conversation...unless you are a third grader.

This past week, my kids learned about Barn Owls and how they swallow their prey whole and regurgitate the material (bones, teeth, fur) that they can't digest. It comes up in the form of a pellet. Cool, huh? Come on, just consider the coolness of this for one minute.

My kids worked in pairs and dissected an owl pellet to discover: a: what animal their Barn Owl ate (rodent, bird, shrew...) and b: to identify bones. They compared the bones in their pellet to human bones. Next week, they will compare them to chicken bones.

I swear...the grosser the experiment, the more 3rd graders like it! I mean, I don't blame them, really. I think I have just as much fun with this dissection as they do! Take a look at some of my kids in action. (Also, the other adult you see in these pictures is Jackie, my amazing and wonderful student teacher.)

Finally, you might be curious how I have my kids learn the main bones in the human body. See, it's very simple...through music. Be careful, though. If you click on this link, you might be singing the bone rap all day!

In case you were wondering...the pellets were sanitized prior to being delivered to the schools!

Back to School Team Building

I sometimes can't believe how much planning goes into the first week of school. Because I believe that building the classroom community must happen before getting heavily into the curriculum, planning for this past week was quite time consuming! Some of the activities I did to build community stemmed from an inservice we had, where Dave Burton presented. In a nutshell, Dave Burton believes in affective education and presented us with many ice-breakers and team-building activities, many of which we, as teachers, did!

One activity dealt with building a bridge. My team had to have the exact same bridge as the other team. To do this, we had to communicate verbally, without ever showing our structure. I decided that this was a great lesson to do (with some modifications) with my own kids to teach the importance of teamwork and communication.

Here, the kids are working together to create a structure that resembles the other team's building,

Here, the kids are communicating with one another in hopes to build the same structures.

This was such an incredible moment! The groups realized that when they finally revealed their structures, they were so similar. They discussed how they thought that their communication and teamwork was great!

 As a closure to this activity, we discussed how lessons learned in this building activity can be related to our school day. The kids were able to make the connection that without good teamwork and communication, work will not get done as well.

It was a great first week. I feel lucky to be working as a 3rd grade teacher at Mattison Avenue ES.